Publications by authors named "Daniel J Dwyer"

Article Synopsis
  • - β-Lactam antibiotics, like mecillinam, disrupt bacterial cell walls by inhibiting penicillin-binding proteins (PBPs) involved in peptidoglycan assembly, leading to a futile cycle of synthesis and degradation.
  • - The study focuses on Escherichia coli and reveals that the lethality from inhibiting PBP2 is caused by toxic metabolic changes, including increased energy demands and accelerated protein synthesis.
  • - The research highlights that the inhibition of PBPs disrupts the balance between anabolic and catabolic processes, affecting ATP production and cellular redox status, which is crucial for the antibiotics' lethal effects.
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The dramatic spread and diversity of antibiotic-resistant pathogens has significantly reduced the efficacy of essentially all antibiotic classes, bringing us ever closer to a postantibiotic era. Exacerbating this issue, our understanding of the multiscale physiological impact of antimicrobial challenge on bacterial pathogens remains incomplete. Concerns over resistance and the need for new antibiotics have motivated the collection of omics measurements to provide systems-level insights into antimicrobial stress responses for nearly 20 years.

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Unlabelled: For over 20 years, bacterial multidrug resistance (MDR) efflux pumps have been studied because of their impact on resistance to antimicrobials. However, critical questions remain, including why produce efflux pumps under non-antimicrobial treatment conditions, and why have multiple pumps if their only purpose is antimicrobial efflux? Salmonella spp. possess five efflux pump families, including the resistance-nodulation-division (RND) efflux pumps.

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Recent insights suggest that non-specific and/or promiscuous enzymes are common and active across life. Understanding the role of such enzymes is an important open question in biology. Here we develop a genome-wide method, PROPER, that uses a permissive PSI-BLAST approach to predict promiscuous activities of metabolic genes.

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Bacteriostatic and bactericidal antibiotic treatments result in two fundamentally different phenotypic outcomes--the inhibition of bacterial growth or, alternatively, cell death. Most antibiotics inhibit processes that are major consumers of cellular energy output, suggesting that antibiotic treatment may have important downstream consequences on bacterial metabolism. We hypothesized that the specific metabolic effects of bacteriostatic and bactericidal antibiotics contribute to their overall efficacy.

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We face an impending crisis in our ability to treat infectious disease brought about by the emergence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens and a decline in the development of new antibiotics. Urgent action is needed. This review focuses on a less well-understood aspect of antibiotic action: the complex metabolic events that occur subsequent to the interaction of antibiotics with their molecular targets and play roles in antibiotic lethality.

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Deeper understanding of antibiotic-induced physiological responses is critical to identifying means for enhancing our current antibiotic arsenal. Bactericidal antibiotics with diverse targets have been hypothesized to kill bacteria, in part by inducing production of damaging reactive species. This notion has been supported by many groups but has been challenged recently.

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In eukaryotic organisms facing terminal stress, activation of genetically encoded cell death pathways underlies fundamental changes in core cellular processes and functional modification of critical biomolecules. These physiological alterations manifest themselves as phenotypic hallmarks during programmed cell death, and are markers of the particular mode of death initiated. A growing volume of work has illustrated that prokaryotes too are capable of exhibiting hallmarks of programmed cell death, albeit without the multiple, tight regulatory layers which control these events in higher order organisms.

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Programmed cell death is a gene-directed process involved in the development and homeostasis of multicellular organisms. The most common mode of programmed cell death is apoptosis, which is characterized by a stereotypical set of biochemical and morphological hallmarks. Here we report that Escherichia coli also exhibit characteristic markers of apoptosis-including phosphatidylserine exposure, chromosome condensation, and DNA fragmentation-when faced with cell death-triggering stress, namely bactericidal antibiotic treatment.

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The development of biomolecular devices that interface with biological systems to reveal new insights and produce novel functions is one of the defining goals of synthetic biology. Our lab previously described a synthetic, riboregulator system that affords for modular, tunable, and tight control of gene expression in vivo. Here we highlight several experimental advantages unique to this RNA-based system, including physiologically relevant protein production, component modularity, leakage minimization, rapid response time, tunable gene expression, and independent regulation of multiple genes.

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Antibiotic drug-target interactions, and their respective direct effects, are generally well characterized. By contrast, the bacterial responses to antibiotic drug treatments that contribute to cell death are not as well understood and have proven to be complex as they involve many genetic and biochemical pathways. In this Review, we discuss the multilayered effects of drug-target interactions, including the essential cellular processes that are inhibited by bactericidal antibiotics and the associated cellular response mechanisms that contribute to killing.

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The alarming spread of bacterial strains exhibiting resistance to current antibiotic therapies necessitates that we elucidate the specific genetic and biochemical responses underlying drug-mediated cell killing, so as to increase the efficacy of available treatments and develop new antibacterials. Recent research aimed at identifying such cellular contributions has revealed that antibiotics induce changes in metabolism that promote the formation of reactive oxygen species, which play a role in cell death. Here we discuss the relationship between drug-induced oxidative stress, the SOS response and their potential combined contribution to resistance development.

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In this post-genomic era, our capacity to explore biological networks and predict network architectures has been greatly expanded, accelerating interest in systems biology. Here, we highlight recent systems biology studies in prokaryotes, consider the challenges ahead, and suggest opportunities for future studies in bacterial models.

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Aminoglycoside antibiotics, such as gentamicin and kanamycin, directly target the ribosome, yet the mechanisms by which these bactericidal drugs induce cell death are not fully understood. Recently, oxidative stress has been implicated as one of the mechanisms whereby bactericidal antibiotics kill bacteria. Here, we use systems-level approaches and phenotypic analyses to provide insight into the pathway whereby aminoglycosides ultimately trigger hydroxyl radical formation.

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Antibiotic mode-of-action classification is based upon drug-target interaction and whether the resultant inhibition of cellular function is lethal to bacteria. Here we show that the three major classes of bactericidal antibiotics, regardless of drug-target interaction, stimulate the production of highly deleterious hydroxyl radicals in Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria, which ultimately contribute to cell death. We also show, in contrast, that bacteriostatic drugs do not produce hydroxyl radicals.

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Modulation of bacterial chromosomal supercoiling is a function of DNA gyrase-catalyzed strand breakage and rejoining. This reaction is exploited by both antibiotic and proteic gyrase inhibitors, which trap the gyrase molecule at the DNA cleavage stage. Owing to this interaction, double-stranded DNA breaks are introduced and replication machinery is arrested at blocked replication forks.

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RNA molecules play important and diverse regulatory roles in the cell by virtue of their interaction with other nucleic acids, proteins and small molecules. Inspired by this natural versatility, researchers have engineered RNA molecules with new biological functions. In the last two years efforts in synthetic biology have produced novel, synthetic RNA components capable of regulating gene expression in vivo largely in bacteria and yeast, setting the stage for scalable and programmable cellular behavior.

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Recent studies have demonstrated the important enzymatic, structural and regulatory roles of RNA in the cell. Here we present a post-transcriptional regulation system in Escherichia coli that uses RNA to both silence and activate gene expression. We inserted a complementary cis sequence directly upstream of the ribosome binding site in a target gene.

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