Michael Palmer

Associate Professor

Michael Palmer carries out research in biochemistry. His research focuses on the interaction of peptides and proteins with biological membranes. One current area of interest is the action mode of lipopeptide antibiotic daptomycin, as well as the mechanism of bacterial resistance to it.

Contact information
Office: ESC 338
Phone: 519-888-4567, ext. 35100
Email: mpalmer@uwaterloo.ca
Website: Michael Palmer

Expertise

Fluorescence
Antibiotics
Membranes
Lipopeptides
Pore-forming toxins

Research

Michael Palmer's research focuses on protein-lipid interaction in biological membranes:

Structure and function of bacterial pore-forming toxins
Structure and function of lipopeptide antibiotics
Development of fluorescence methods to study protein-protein and protein-membrane interaction

His experiments involve a range of methods including fluorescence, protein chemistry, and molecular biology.

Teaching

Michael Palmer teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. Recent course offerings include metabolism, biochemical pharmacology, biological membranes, and computer methods in protein structure and function.

Highlighted Publications

Recent publications include

Kralt, B., Moreira, R., Palmer, M., & Taylor, S. D. (2019). Total Synthesis of Analogs of A54145D and A54145A1 for Structure-Activity Relationship Studies. The Journal of Organic Chemistry.
Kralt, B., Moreira, R., Palmer, M., & Taylor, S. D. (2019). Total Synthesis of A54145 Factor D. The Journal of organic chemistry, 84(18), 12021-12030.
Li, Y., Zeng, W., Fan, W., Ma, H., Fan, X., Jiang, J., Brefo-Mensah, E., Zhang, Y., Yang, M., Dong, Z. and Palmer, M. (2019). Structure determination of the CAMP factor of Streptococcus agalactiae with the aid of an MBP tag and insights into membrane-surface attachment. Acta Crystallographica Section D: Structural Biology, 75(8), 772-781.
Noden, M., Moreira, R., Huang, E., Yousef, A., Palmer, M., & Taylor, S. D. (2019). Total Synthesis of Paenibacterin and Its Analogues. The Journal of organic chemistry, 84(9), 5339-5347.
Moreira, R., Barnawi, G., Beriashvili, D., Palmer, M., & Taylor, S. D. (2019). The effect of replacing the ester bond with an amide bond and of overall stereochemistry on the activity of daptomycin. Bioorganic & medicinal chemistry, 27(1), 240-246.
Barnawi, G., Noden, M., Taylor, R., Lohani, C., Beriashvili, D., Palmer, M., & Taylor, S. D. (2019). An entirely fmoc solid phase approach to the synthesis of daptomycin analogs. Peptide Science, 111(1), e23094.