Bringing a structural perspective to antimicrobial resistance; can we predict whether individual mutations confer resistance or not?
Status: This talk is in preparation - details may change
Status: This talk has been cancelled
CANCELLED DUE TO WEATHER CONDITIONS.
Clinical microbiology is steadily undergoing a genetic revolution; instead of being cultured, clinical samples will instead be sequenced using whole-genome sequencing (WGS) technologies and the effectiveness of a panel of antibiotics inferred from the presence or absence of mutations in a set of known resistance genes. This has already happened in the UK; last March Public Health England switched to using WGS for routine diagnosis of tuberculosis. A major problem is that this approach cannot make a prediction if it encounters novel or rare mutations in the set of resistance genes. We will show how structural biology, combined with molecular simulation, is able to predict whether mutations confer resistance (or not) to (a) trimethoprim in S. aureus [1] and (b) rifampicin in M. tuberculosis (unpublished). Looking forward, this approach, or ones like it, could be extended to minimise the number of “escape routes” a protein has to abrogate the action of a novel antibiotic, which would help de-risk antibiotic drug development.
Date: 2 March 2018, 13:00 (Friday, 7th week, Hilary 2018)
Venue: NDM Building, Headington OX3 7FZ
Venue Details: TDI seminar room
Speaker: Dr Philip Fowler (Experimental Medicine Division, Nuffield Department of Medicine, John Radcliffe Hospital)
Organising department: Structural Genomics Consortium
Organiser: Natsumi Astley (University of Oxford )
Organiser contact email address: natsumi.astley@sgc.ox.ac.uk
Host: Dr Tobias Krojer (SGC Oxford)
Part of: CMD Seminars
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Natsumi Astley