Roux wins award for Top Poster Presentation at International Conference

Overview of the Award

Christelle Roux was awarded one of three top-poster presentation awards from among 98 contestants at the International Conference on Gram-Positive pathogens for her work "Characterization of Staphylococcus aureus Messenger RNA Degradosome Holoenzyme Complex".

Christelle Roux

Research Summary

Portrait of Christelle RouxS. aureus causes more U.S. deaths annually than human immunodeficiency virus and Mycobacterium tuberculosis combined. One of the major reasons this organism is associated with such high rates of mortality is due to the emergence of antibiotic resistance, effectively eliminating the anti-staphylococcal utility of most currently available antibiotics. Therefore, new antibiotics are urgently needed for the therapeutic intervention of S. aureus infections. To this end, our laboratory focuses on mRNA turnover, an essential biological process that has never been exploited for S. aureus antibiotic drug discovery. The mRNA machinery that governs S. aureus’s ability to degrade RNA is unknown, thus one of my projects is to characterize the components of its mRNA degradosome and subsequently assess their potential as targets for antibiotic drug discovery.

Education

Christelle Roux obtained her Bachelor and Master's degrees in Tours, France. She received her Doctorate of Philosophy degree studying DNA repair networks in Brucella in the Biology Department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. (mentor: Dr. Don Ennis)

Christelle started her postdoctoral training studying the role of the type IV secretion system in Brucella under the guidance of Dr. Renée Tsolis in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California at Davis.

Currently, Christelle is working under the mentorship of Dr. Paul Dunman, whose laboratory is investigating the role of RNA turnover in Staphylococcus aureus pathogenesis, in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Rochester Medical Center's School of Medicine and Dentistry.