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Computational Approaches To Anti-Toxin Therapies And Biomarker Identification, Rebecca Jane Swett
Computational Approaches To Anti-Toxin Therapies And Biomarker Identification, Rebecca Jane Swett
Wayne State University Dissertations
This work describes the fundamental study of two bacterial toxins with computational methods, the rational design of a potent inhibitor using molecular dynamics, as well as the development of two bioinformatic methods for mining genomic data.
Clostridium difficile is an opportunistic bacillus which produces two large glucosylating toxins. These toxins, TcdA and TcdB cause severe intestinal damage. As Clostridium difficile harbors considerable antibiotic resistance, one treatment strategy is to prevent the tissue damage that the toxins cause. The catalytic glucosyltransferase domain of TcdA and TcdB was studied using molecular dynamics in the presence of both a protein-protein binding partner and …