Dr. Sean Elliott Receives 4 Year National Institute of Health Grant to study “Structure, Function and Diversity in the Bacterial Cytochrome c Peroxidase Family”
Dr. Sean Elliott was recently awarded 4 years of support from the National Institute of Health (NIH) for his research into bCCPs.
The new grant will enable studies in the Elliott Group to dissect the way in which nature has made use of a common motif of bioinorganic chemistry, the iron-bearing structure known as a c-type heme, and to utilize it for diverse chemistry. While Elliott has a long-running interest in heme and redox chemistry, here the group studies the titular ‘bacterial cytochrome c peroxidase’ (or, bCCP) family of enzymes. While prototypical bCCPs are found in gram negative microorganisms where they detoxify endogenous or exogenous hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), the Elliott group has realized that there exist in microbes novel bCCPs which engage in unknown chemistry. In the work sponsored by the NIH, the Elliott group will use a combination of biochemistry, electrochemistry, spectroscopy and structural biology to elucidate the bCCPs found in under appreciated microbes, and attempt to rationalize why the enzymes work as they do.
The work to be supported is a team effort where the enzymes discovered and produced in the Elliott Group will be examined here at BU, but also in collaboration with structural biologists at MIT and spectroscopists at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Michigan.
As bCCPs are enzymes on the front-line of the native defenses of NIH Select List pathogens including Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Burkholderia complex species, Vibrio cholerae, Campylobacter jejuni, and Yersinia pestis, these studies will provide fundamental insight into the long-term development of new antimicrobial compounds that will target the novel features of bCCP structure.”
Dr. Elliott, who is also a two time recipient of the Scialog® Award Research Corporation (2010-2011), and received the 2007 Gitner Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2007 and an NSF CAREER Award in 2005 (among other honors), works with the Elliott Research Group to investigate the interplay between biological systems and redox-active species (e.g., metal ions, organic radicals, disulfide bonds, reactive oxygen species). Their emphasis is on the kinetic and thermodynamic basis for catalytic redox chemistry, as well as the molecular basis of how nature tune redox cofactors do the hard work of Life.