News & Events

When

Date - January 27, 2017
1:00 pm

What

University of Alabama in Huntsville
Department of Chemistry

Title: “Novel Antimicrobial Approaches: Peptidyl-tRNA Hydrolases & Antifungal Lectins”

Abstract:

Around the world, the incidence of drug resistance continues to escalate for nearly every disease.  Thus the need for new drugs and new drug targets is urgent and growing.  Bacterial peptidyl-tRNA hydrolase (Pth) and high mannose binding lectins are promising targets for novel antimicrobial development.  From convergence of phylogenetics, bioassay development, natural product screening, structural biology, and computational docking, a much improved understanding of small molecule inhibition is known for peptidyl-tRNA hydrolases.  As novel inhibitors are found and structure activity relationships emerge, the construction of affinity columns has expedited isolation of new inhibitory compounds from a variety of natural products.  For high mannose binding lectins, newly discovered antifungal activity provides a novel approach for therapeutic development.  Localized to the cell wall, this new potential therapeutic acts synergistically with existing antifungals and has broad spectrum antifungal activity.