Events

Event Description

Join the Chemistry Department for a talk by Professor Sarah Smith.

Understanding the role of sequence and structure in the function and design of antimicrobial peptides

As antibiotic-resistant infections spread worldwide, the need to develop novel antimicrobial agents is urgent. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are produced by organisms throughout nature that have broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity, but have not yet been widely adopted as pharmaceuticals. We are working to better understand the relationships between the amino acid sequence, biophysical properties, antimicrobial activity, and specificity of AMPs to consider how they can be adopted as therapeutics. Prof. Smith will discuss her work in identifying the impact of a single amino acid change on the antimicrobial properties of Cecropins, a class of AMPs, produced by Drosophila melanogaster. She will then describe our successes in engineering shorter AMPs based on the native Cecropin sequences, and our ongoing work to elucidate the mechanism of action of both the full-length and shortened peptides. 

Prof. Smith graduated from MIT with degrees in chemistry and biology. While she was an undergraduate student, she worked in the lab of Prof Stephen Lippard. She completed her PhD in 2016 at the University of California, San Diego in bioinorganic chemistry in the lab of Prof Akif Tezcan. She moved to the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow to work with Prof Shana Kelley, using synthetic biology to design electrochemical-based devices for disease detection. She started her independent career at Bucknell University in 2018.