Monica Gerth, PhD

Background

Ph.D. in Chemistry, Emory University, 2007

B.Sc., The Evergreen State College, 2002

Research interests

I am interested in how bacteria go about the day-to-day business of getting fed and how they have evolved to do so. At the molecular level, Pseudomonads enjoy a diverse diet of carbon and nitrogen sources. This makes them excellent model systems for asking biochemical and evolutionary questions. Addressing these questions may also suggest new ways to exploit a bacterium's own metabolism in the ongoing war against microbial infection.

• The fitness cost of gluttony - Can we use our knowledge of protein structure and function to design drugs for controlling Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection? I am targeting metabolic governor proteins, which may cause the bacterium to "eat itself to death" if they are inhibited.

• Evolution of metabolic pathways - How do bacteria maintain appropriate intracellular carbon-to-nitrogen ratios while maximizing their growth and fitness, particularly when challenged with nutrient sources (such as amino acids) that deliver both elements in the same molecule? I am interested in the diversity of histidine utilization pathways in the Pseudomonads, as this is a microcosm of metabolic pathway evolution.

Publications from previous work

Gerth, M.L. , Lutz, S. (2007) Non-homologous recombination of deoxyribonucleoside kinases from human and Drosophila melanogaster yields human-like enzymes with novel activities. J. Mol. Biol. 370: 742-751.

Gerth, M.L., Lutz, S. (2007) Mutagenesis of non-conserved active site residues improves the activity and narrows the specificity of human thymidine kinase 2. Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. 354: 802-807.

Gerth, M.L. , Patrick, W.M., Lutz, S. (2004) A second-generation system for unbiased reading frame selection. Protein Eng. Des. Sel. 17: 595-602.