A step closer to understanding, averting drug resistance

Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is growing exponentially. One reason is that drug resistant proteins are transporting "good" antibiotics, or inhibitors, out of the cells, leaving them to mutate. In a paper recently published in the journal Nature, Brandies University Professor of Biochemistry Dorothee Kern and collaborators including former postdoctoral student Katherine A. Henzler-Wildman, looked at how one of these drug transporters, EmrE, works. The hope is that someday a drug will be developed to impede this motion of transport. Read more