Title: “Sleuthing” the lipidome for vulnerabilities in bacterial pathogens
Bio:
Professor Laura M. K. Dassama is a chemical biologist who uses tools of chemistry and physics to provide molecular insights into complex biological processes. Her research focuses on using chemical tools to expand the “druggable” human proteome and to uncover druggable vulnerabilities in human pathogens. Dassama hails from Liberia but received her undergraduate training at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. Her PhD studies at Pennsylvania State University (with Marty Bollinger and Carsten Krebs) used enzymology and spectroscopy to understand the mechanisms of metalloenzymes, while her postdoctoral research at Northwestern University (with Amy Rosenzweig) focused on elucidating biosynthetic and transport mechanisms of bacterial natural products. Prior to starting her independent career at Stanford University, she spent a year in Hematology/Oncology at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School studying the control of hemoglobin regulators relevant to sickle cell disease (with Stu Orkin). She established her research group at Stanford Chemistry and the Sarafan ChEM-H Institute in 2018 and in 2022, received an appointment in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at Stanford School of Medicine.
Abstract:
Lipids are critical components of cell envelopes and are involved in important signaling processes. Yet several bacterial pathogens are deficient in the biosynthesis of these critical molecules. This talk highlights our recent work employing traditional methods to reveal new lipid handling machinery on proteome-wide scales and describes our development of new tools to guide the discovery of essential lipid handling proteins. We posit that these approaches together will reveal novel targets for therapeutic interventions in infectious diseases and disorders of aberrant lipid metabolism.
Keywords: chemical biology, lipids, structural biology, infectious disease
Host: Prof. Andrew Buller