Grant: Operating Grant

The growing resistance of bacterial infections to standard antibiotic therapies has quickly become a major and frightening health concern around the globe. The causative agents of serious illnesses such as hospital staph infections, tuberculosis and meningitis are showing increasing numbers of antibiotic resistant strains both within the hospital and community settings. Some particular bacterial infections, often termed "superbugs", have become entirely resistant to all clinically utilized antibiotics. Our research aim is to understand both the way in which bacteria resist current families of antibiotics and to design new antibiotic drugs based on inhibiting specific features of the bacterial life-cycle. We will undertake this research by characterizing the three-dimensional atomic structures of molecules critical to the viability of the bacteria. By knowing these structures in such fine detail, a molecular blue-print if you will, we can design drugs (antibiotics) that specifically inhibit or "turn off" these critical molecules of the bacteria, destroying the infection in the process. In this way we hope to continue the era of control over bacterial pathogens that we have had the privilege of living in this past half century.