Allison Lopatkin, Ph.D.

Research

The Lopatkin lab will explore how changes in bacterial metabolism contribute to the development of antibiotic resistance. Decades of antibiotic overuse—in both clinical and agricultural settings—have led to an alarming rise in bacterial strains that are resistant to antibiotics, contributing to a major public health concern. Currently, the study of antibiotic resistance mechanisms focuses mostly on a small handful of highly conserved intracellular targets that reduce antibiotic-target binding. However, as a postdoctoral fellow, I discovered that many bacteria can also escape the effects of these drugs by amassing widely diverse mutations that interfere with their metabolism. Now, using a suite of sophisticated tools integrating microbiology, biochemistry, and quantitative and computational biology techniques, my lab will identify the drug-resistance mutations that arise in bacteria as they adapt to combinations of different antibiotics and metabolism-altering chemicals. These insights will allow us to determine how microbial metabolism contributes to the development of antibiotic resistance in real-world clinical contexts, including in vancomycin-treated infectious disease patients. This work will facilitate the development of improved diagnostic and prognostic tests for assessing antibiotic susceptibility, as well as novel classes of infection-fighting drugs.