Mark Christopher Capece

Mark Christopher Capece

Molecular Mechanisms of Macrolide Antibiotics
Cohort
2016
Graduation Year
2016

Mentors: Chaitan Khosla, Vijay Pande, and Jody Puglisi

Biography
Mark Capece is currently a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry working under the advisorship of Profs. Jody Puglisi and Chaitan Khosla. He obtained his B.S. in Chemistry and Physics from the University of Louisville in 2011. Mark’s scientific interests are in the areas of nuclear magnetic resonance and astrobiology.

Research Summary
Although macrolide antibiotics have been available for over 50 years, their dynamic molecular mechanisms of action remain unclear, and ignorance of their structural and kinetic properties, especially as these properties evolve as a function of time and state of translation, hinders the development of next-generation antibiotics. Mark’s project aims to better understand the kinetics and pathways involved in antibiotic macrolide-ribosome interactions leading to the inhibition of translation, particularly the transient conformational states sampled by biologically-active macrolides within the binding pocket and the temporal arrangement of macrolide association during translation. To achieve this goal, a collaboration between the Khosla, Puglisi and Pande groups has been established to combine novel synthetic chemistry techniques with the dynamic structural methods of NMR spectroscopy and single-molecule FRET to generate time-dependent structural data for computational modeling. Time-resolved models of macrolide action on the ribosome will inform the design of next-generation antibiotics by indicating key structural features involved in macrolide binding and peptide-mediated macrolide resistance.