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PIRES LABORATORY
chemical microbiology & immunology group
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DRUG DISCOVERY & PROBE DEVELOPMENT
MOLECULAR GRAMMAR OF ACCUMULATION IN BACTERIA
Why are we running out of antibiotics? Often the real problem isn't resistance — it's that drugs can't get inside bacteria at all, and the barriers that block them differ from one pathogen to the next. We build novel assays that measure where molecules accumulate inside living bacteria, decoding the grammar that governs how a compound crosses each organism's defenses. The result is a set of design rules that turns antibiotic discovery from trial-and-error into something you can actually engineer.
Center for Antibiotic Refinement via Accumulation Profiling (CARvAP)
CHEMICAL
IMMUNOLOGY AND AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE
Your immune system is built to attack threats and spare your own cells — but sometimes that line breaks down, and it turns on the body it's meant to protect. One culprit: chemical modifications to proteins can rewrite the molecular name tags that cells display on MHC, making a harmless self-protein suddenly look foreign. We study how these altered tags push the immune system to misfire, and we design molecules to probe — and ultimately rein in — that mistaken attack. It's a project for someone who wants to use synthetic chemistry to understand why immunity goes wrong, and how to fix it.
PEPTIDOGLYCAN BIOSYNTHESIS TOOLS AND DRUG DISCOVERY
Every bacterium is wrapped in a mesh called peptidoglycan — the armor that keeps it alive and the target of our oldest, best antibiotics. We chemically synthesize look-alike building blocks that bacteria mistake for the real thing and stitch into their own walls, giving us a front-row view of how that wall is built and where it can be broken. The very same fragments turn out to be molecular messages that gut bacteria send to our immune system, linking cell-wall chemistry to how the microbiome shapes our health.
Home: Research
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