Application of proteomic strategies to characterise S. aureus virulence and its resistance to antibiotics.
Research program rewarded by the 2007 Viollier Award.
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S. aureus can produce at least thousands of different proteins; more
products than genes. To pinpoint factors of virulence and understand
mechanisms of resistance to some antibiotics, it is imperative to look at
the proteins which are operative as functional components. Discovery of
differences in protein expression will generate targets for further
biological analysis.
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Two specific objectives of our current research are to:
- build a protein expression index for various S. aureus strains;
- perform comparative analysis of the various strains under different biological growth conditions.
To achieve this, various technologies are employed for
differential display analysis and mass spectrometry for identification of proteins. The use
of various technologies allows one to capture molecular diversity in S.
aureus without preconceived ideas about which information will be most
valuable to monitor, or which technologies will have the greatest impact.
We have recently set-up the stage for correlating transcriptomic and proteomic data (Scherl et al., J Microbiol Methods. 2005),
and streamlined the process of peptide identification (Scherl et al., Proteomics. 2004).
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