NSF Grant Awarded to BC Researchers

With the support of NSF Division of Chemistry through the Molecular Foundations for Biotechnology (MFB) Solicitation, Professors Abhishek Chatterjee, Eranthie Weerapana (Department of Chemistry) and Tim van Opijnen (Department of Biology)  will develop technology to study how pathogenic bacteria adapt when infecting animals and develop resistance to antibiotic treatment, a defining challenge of our time. This technology will enable the characterization of the proteomic changes in pathogenic bacteria in physiologically relevant live-animal infection models. Such studies have been traditionally challenging due to the difficulty of isolating bacterial cells (or its cellular components) from infected animal tissue. The research team will develop a genetically encoded technology for selectively tagging proteins made in the bacterial cells, which will enable their efficient isolation from the infection site. In addition, the precise protein labeling technology developed here will be further exploited to synthesize homogeneous antibody-drug conjugates, a highly promising class of biotherapeutics being used to treat challenging diseases like cancer.