Applying Basic Bacteriology to the Global Health Challenges of Infectious Disease
The rise of antibiotic resistance in bacterial pathogens represents an escalating global health crisis. Our lab will help tackle this problem by lending its expertise in bacterial cell biology to identifying new antibiotic drugs and drug targets. More specifically, we will use our understanding of a new set of essential bacterial proteins, the bacterial cytoskeleton, to discover both new families of proteins that are essential for bacterial pathogenesis (candidate drug targets) and small molecules that perturb these proteins (candidate drugs). As a promising proof of principal, we recently identified a small molecule that targets the essential bacterial actin-like cytoskeleton, and preliminary studies suggest that this simple and inexpensive compound can block the growth and virulence of a wide range of human pathogens. Our research will engage a multidisciplinary group of scientists at the undergraduate, graduate, postdoc, and faculty levels. We will also hope to integrate our efforts with those of the greater Princeton community through new inter-disciplinary courses, seminar series, and interest groups.
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