Gnana S. Gnanakaran, Los Alamos National Labs
Abstract:
At present we mainly rely on antibiotics for the treatment of bacterial infections encountered in public health and bio-threat scenarios. However rapid emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria poses a major hurdle in the treatment of such infections. Membrane protein complexes, called the multi-drug resistance efflux pumps are the most important machinery that bacteria utilize to pump out almost all types of antibiotics before they can act on their targets. Although all bacteria express these efflux pumps, very little is known about how they work. In this talk, I will describe our efforts to develop an experiment-based multi-scale model that integrates structural, genetic, and cellular processes to understand how efflux pumps work.
