Caren Freel Meyers
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biochemistry
Bacteria that cause serious infections can survive in the body partly by rewiring their own metabolism when conditions get hard, such as when the immune system starves them of nutrients. If that rewiring could be blocked, pathogens might lose the flexibility they need to establish an infection.
- Fields
Biochemistry
Chemistry
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
DXP synthase
1-deoxy-D-xylulose 5-phosphate
thiamin diphosphate
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through May 2030
What they work on
- Determine how ligand-gated substrate conversion occurs on DXPS, the thiamin diphosphate-dependent enzyme that makes the metabolite DXP, comparing enzymes from different bacterial species.
- Define the global shape changes DXPS undergoes and test how these conformational dynamics matter for its activity or regulation.
- Test the hypothesis that inhibiting DXPS blocks pathogen metabolic adaptation in the host, advancing selective inhibitors with antibacterial activity toward strategies against clinical pathogens.
- Build an accessible toolkit of pan-DXPS chemical probes that can be applied across multiple serious bacterial pathogens to study DXPS-driven metabolic adaptation during infection.
More about the research
Work in this lab centers on one enzyme at the heart of that flexibility: 1-deoxy-D-xylulose 5-phosphate synthase, or DXPS, which makes a small molecule (DXP) that feeds into the production of vitamins and isoprenoids, building blocks bacteria cannot do without. Humans do not make DXP, so the enzyme is attractive as a drug target. Three connected projects ask how DXPS works chemically, build chemical tools to study it inside microbes, and test whether shutting it down disables pathogens during infection.
Why it matters
Antibiotic resistance narrows the options for treating common infections. By targeting an enzyme bacteria and parasites need but humans lack, this work could open a new class of antibacterial strategies that block a pathogen's ability to adapt inside the body, and may allow narrow-spectrum drugs that spare beneficial microbes. The chemical probes developed could also be shared tools for studying microbial metabolism in health and disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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Eric W Schmidt
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The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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