Research Bio
Fungal infections are a serious and growing problem among people with compromised immunity, including those undergoing or recovering from chemotherapy and people with HIV/AIDS. There are very few effective anti-fungal drugs, particularly when compared to the arsenal available to treat bacterial infections.
In collaboration with Dr. Damian Krysan, Dr. Melanie Wellington and the members of their laboratories, I am using a novel high-throughput assay developed in the Krysan laboratory to discover new anti-fungal compounds. We then use a variety of biochemical, genetic, and in vivo mouse experiments to characterize the compounds uncovered by the assay: to explore their mechanism of action as well as their potential utility in treating infection, either alone or in combination with other anti-fungal compounds.
Because of its unique characteristics and thus lack of overlap with the human host, we are particularly interested in compounds that affect the fungal cell wall, and we are using genetic approaches to bias our chemical library screening toward this class of compounds. The fungal cell wall is relatively poorly understood, and we expect these compounds to be useful not only in treating fungal infections, but also in helping us understand cell wall structure and function.
2010 Jun
Didone L, Scrimale T, Baxter BK, Krysan DJ. "A high-throughput assay of yeast cell lysis for drug discovery and genetic analysis." Nature protocols. 2010 Jun 0; 5(6):1107-14. Epub 2010 May 27. |
2005
Baxter BK, Abeliovich H, Zhang Z, Stirling AG, Burlingame AL, Goldfarb DS. "Atg19p ubiquitination and the cytosol to vacuole trafficking pathway in yeast". Journal of Biological Chemistry. 2005; 280(47): 39067-39076. |
1999
Bressan DA; Baxter BK; Petrini JHJ. "The Mre11-Rad50-Xrs2 protein complex facilitates homologous recombination-based double-strand break repair in Saccharomyces cerevisiae". Molecular and Cellular Biology. 1999; 19: 7681-7687. |
1998
Baxter BK, Craig EA. "Suppression of an Hsp70 mutant phenotype in Saccharomyces cerevisiae through loss of function of the chromatin component Sin1p/Spt2p". Journal of Bacteriology. 1998; 180: 6484-6492. |
1998
Baxter BK, Craig EA. "Isolation of UBP3, encoding a de-ubiquitinating enzyme, as a multicopy suppressor of a heat-shock mutant strain of S. cerevisiae". Current Genetics. 1998; 33: 412-419. |
