Date: Thursday, October 31, 2002
Time: 3:30 PM
Location: 118, Nieuwland Hall, Notre Dame

Speaker: Dr. David Gidalevitz

From: University of Leeds

Title: Interaction of Antimicrobial Peptides with Artificial Biomembranes

Abstract:
The emergence of multi-drug resistant strains of bacteria has heightened resurgent interest in developing new classes of antibiotics. Over the recent years antimicrobial peptides with membrane-lytic activity have emerged as promising therapeutic agents. One of the hurdles in development of viable antimicrobial peptides-based drugs is lack of understanding their mechanism of action on molecular level. In this talk I will focus on our very recent efforts to bridge this gap. Biological membranes were modeled with a planar lipid monolayer, whose composition was modified according to a specific type of lipids present in bacterial or red blood cell membranes. Interaction of antimicrobial peptides with cell membranes is, therefore, represented as interaction between lipid monolayers deposited on an aqueous subphase and antimicrobial peptides dissolved in this subphase. Such model makes possible use of a variety of powerful and previously inaccessible to this domain area experimental techniques such as epifluorescence microscopy, X-ray reflectivity and grazing incidence X-ray diffraction.

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/chemeng/staff/Gidalevitz/