Marissa Viola

School: University of Rhode Island
Degree: Ph.D., Cell and Molecular Biology
Advisor: Jodi L. Camberg
Expected defense/completion date: Summer 2017
Research: As bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance mechanisms to currently available drugs, the need for new antibiotics grows. Traditional antibiotics disrupt cell wall machinery; however, there is great potential for alternative antibiotics to disrupt protein interactions important for cell division since this pathway is essential for bacterial survival. The essential cell division protein FtsZ is highly conserved across bacterial species, and therefore a promising broad-spectrum antibiotic target. FtsZ is a prokaryotic homolog of tubulin and polymerizes to form a dynamic protein structure called the “Z-ring” at midcell, eventually constricting to divide a mother cell into two identical daughter cells. For my thesis, I study the interactions of modulatory proteins with the Z-ring for successful cell division in vivo and analyze biochemical interactions in vitro for model organism Escherichia coli. For my EPSCoR project, I purified FtsZ from Vibrio anguillarum to analyze species-specific properties of the essential cell division protein from a fish pathogen.