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Presenter: Dr. Leslie Hicks, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Abstract: As current methods for antibiotic drug discovery are being outpaced by the rise of antimicrobial resistance, new methods and innovative technologies are crucial to replenish our dwindling arsenal of antimicrobial therapeutics. While natural products are a well-studied source of biologically active small molecules, peptidyl factors contributing to their medicinal properties remain largely unexplored. To this end, we have developed the PepSAVI-MS pipeline to identify bioactive peptide targets from complex biological samples. PepSAVI-MS is highly versatile as it is adaptable to any natural product source of peptides and can test against diverse physiological targets (e.g. bacteria, fungi, and cancer cells) for which there is a developed bioassay. As such, we demonstrate extension of this pipeline to fungal and bacterially-sourced AMPs and are now probing the vast array of botanical natural product sources to prioritize highly active species for downstream analysis.
Bio: Dr. Hicks received her B.S. in Chemistry at Marshall University, summa cum laude, and Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she was the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She was an Assistant Member and Principal Investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and an adjunct professor in the Department of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis prior to assuming a position in the Department of Chemistry at UNC Chapel Hill where she is currently the Sherman Fairchild Foundation Chancellor’s Science Scholar Term Assoc. Professor.
Hosted by Dr. M. Leandro Heien.