Williams Awarded $338K Research Grant
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Amy Gehring, associate professor of chemistry at Williams College, has been awarded a $338,450 three-year grant by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a project titled "Relationship of Antibiotic Production and Development in Streptomyces coelicolor."Streptomyces are common soil bacteria that grow in a relatively complex manner. They also produce antibiotics as an integral part of their lifecycle, making them a rich source for the discovery of pharmaceutically important compounds. Gehring's project aims to understand how Streptomyces bacteria make such useful compounds throughout their lifecycle.
"The more we understand about these processes," Gehring said, "the more likely it becomes that we can engineer these bacteria to produce increased yields or varieties of life-saving drugs."
Specifically, she plans to look for molecular connections between the processes of antibiotic production and morphological development in Streptomyces coelicolor. The project's aims concern two types of proteins that influence antibiotic production.
First, Gehring will study S. coelicolor strains that are deficient in or overproduce antibiotics because of mutations in genes for phosphopantetheinyl transferase enzymes. She will compare expression of the antibiotic regulatory and developmental genes of the mutant S. coelicolor to those of the wild type S. coelicolor. Gehring hopes this mutational strategy will help engineer the most efficient antibiotic-producing bacteria.
Second, Gehring will utilize an S. coelicolor mutant that produces high levels of a likely stress response sigma factor. She will compare the genes expressed and proteins produced in the mutant S. coelicolor to wild type S. coelicolor to determine how the stress response affects antibiotic production and developmental events. Gehring hopes that a better understanding of how secondary metabolism and development are mutually influenced will suggest generalizable strategies for effective pharmaceutical production in the streptomycetes.
Gehring's research has appeared in a number of scientific journals, including the Journal of Bacteriology, Chemistry & Biology, and Biochemistry. She is also the co-inventor of U.S. Patent number 6,579,695: Phosphopantetheinyl transferases and uses thereof. At Williams, she teaches courses in biochemistry and molecular biology, such as "Enzyme Kinetics and Reaction Mechanisms" and "Biochemistry I: Structure and Function of Biological Molecules."
Gehring has been at Williams since 2002. She received her B.A. from the college in 1994 and her Ph.D. in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard University in 1998.
