Ahmad Jomaa, PhD
Ahmad Jomaa, PhD, is co-first and senior author on research published in Nature Communications about the high-resolution structure of the bacterial ribosome, which could lead to better antimicrobial drugs to fight the spread of infectious diseases.
Ribosomes make new proteins in all living cells. In bacteria, these machines are an important target for antimicrobial drugs to fight the spread of infectious diseases. Research from the UVA School of Medicine, University College Cork in Cork, Ireland, and the Imaging Center at EMBL Heidelberg, Germany, used a state-of-the art technique, single particle cryo-electron microscopy, to determine an ultra-high resolution structure of the bacterial ribosome from Escherichia coli at 1.55 Å resolution. This is currently the highest resolution accomplished for the ribosome.
The research article published in Nature Communications in February 2023 provides a deeper understanding of how proteins are made by ribosomes, and also allows for a more accurate structure-guided drug design to fight the rise of bacterial resistance. The research team includes School of Medicine researchers Ahmad Jomaa and Michael Purdy in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics. Researchers from other institutions are Simon A. Fromm, Kate M. O’Connor, Pramod R. Bhatt, Gary Loughran, John F. Atkins and Simone Mattei.