Sarah Bening (COLLINS LAB)

Using Metabolic Responses to Antibiotics to Rationally Design Drug Combinations

Antibiotic combinations are often used to increase treatment efficacy or overcome antibiotic resistance, but drug interaction mechanisms and their context dependence remain poorly understood. Because bacterial metabolism is broadly altered by antibiotic action and also affects antibiotic efficacy, the goal of my project is to explore how metabolic responses to individual antibiotics affect drug interactions. This work can inform optimal drug pairings and the environmental conditions in which they will be most effective.

Erika DeBenedictis (TIDOR LAB)

Studying Evolution with Robotic PACE

Directed evolution is a powerful engineering tool. We have adopted a directed evolution technique called Phage Assisted Continuous Evolution (PACE) to run on a robotic platform, which vastly increases the number of experiments that can run in parallel. We will use the enhanced capabilities of Robotic PACE to evolve a set of orthogonal inteins, and to understand why and how experimental conditions impact the results of directed evolution experiments.