Helen I. Zgurskaya

Affiliation:

University of Oklahoma
USA

Contact:

Phone: +1 510 367 7731
Email: elenaz@ou.edu
Website:

Key words:

Antibiotic resistance, efflux pumps and their inhibitors, transport mechanisms

Expertise:

biochemistry, microbiology, molecular transport The Center for Antibiotic Discovery and Resistance is a multidisciplinary research initiative by experts in microbiology, mechanistic biochemistry, experimental and computational biophysics and medicinal chemistry. The investigators are from the University of Oklahoma (Helen Zgurskaya, Valentin Rybenkov, AdamDuerfeldt), St Louis University (John Walker), Georgia Institute of Technology (JC Gumbart), University of Cagliari (Paolo Ruggerone), Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (Derek Tan), Los Alamos National Laboratory (Gnanakaran) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Jeremy Smith and Jerry Parks).

Role in the network:

Support the discovery of fundamental principles that govern permeation of antibiotics into bacterial cells and to utilize them for the development of novel small molecule therapeutics effective against antibiotic resistant Gram-negative bacteria.

References:

• Cooper et al. 2018. Molecular properties that define the activities of antibiotics in Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. ACS Infect. Dis. 4(8):1223-1234. doi: 10.1021/acsinfecdis.8b00036.
• Krishnamoorthy et al., 2017. Synergy between active efflux and outer membrane diffusion defines the rules of antibiotic permeation into Gram-negative bacteria. MBio.8(5).pii: e01172-17. doi: 10.1128/mBio.01172-17.