Dr. Eric A. Josephs (Joint School of Nanoscience & Nanoengineering) received new funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the project “Mechanism and Architecture of EndoMS/NucS Mutation Avoidance in Mycobacteria.”
In 2017, there were 10 million incident cases of tuberculosis (TB) worldwide, over 500,000 of which were resistant to first-line antibiotics and over 400,000 of which resistant to multiple drugs. While Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that causes TB, acquires drug resistance exclusively through chromosomal mutations events, the molecular processes which govern the mechanisms of mutation and mutation avoidance in M. tuberculosis remain poorly understood. We will use next-generation biotechnologies to understand how a newly-discovered but cryptic mutational avoidance mechanism works in M. smegmatis (a model organism for M. tuberculosis) in order to gain new insights into how drug resistance emerges and how we can combat it.
