Research in the Taylor Group is interdisciplinary ranging from synthetic and medicinal chemistry to enzymology and bionanotechnology.
Novel Antibiotics
The World Health Organization considers multidrug resistant (MDR) bacteria to be a major threat to human health and has emphasized the need for new antibiotics and The Public Health Agency of Canada has put out a call for research aimed at improving understanding of antimicrobial resistance and the development of new antibiotics. The Taylor group studies a class of antibiotics called cyclic lipodepsipeptide antibiotics (cLPAs). Daptomycin (see below), an important antibiotic used for treating difficult infections caused by Gram-positive bacteria, is an example of this type of antibiotic. Other cLPAs currently under study in the Taylor group are shown below. The objectives of this work are to develop syntheses of these molecules, establish their targets and elucidate fundamental aspects of their mechanism of action. The long-term goal is to use the experience we obtained from our synthetic studies and the information gleaned from our MoA studies to develop antibiotics with superiour properties such as good activity against multidrug resistant bacteria. For these studies we employ a variety of analytical techniques such as fluorescence spectroscopy, isothermal titration calorimetry and NMR spectroscopy.
Nucleoside and Nucleotide chemistry
Many anticancer and antiviral drugs are nucleoside analogs. We are interested in developing novel approaches to the synthesis of nucleosides and nucleoside polyphosphates and their conjugates and then applying this methodology to the synthesis of compounds that can be used as inhibitors and probes of therapeutically significant enzymes such as cytidine triphosphate synthase an anticancer and antiviral target.
Synthetic Methodology and Medicinal Chemistry/Enzymology
We develop novel synthetic methodology and then apply this new chemistry to the synthesis of molecules that are designed to be biophysical probes and inhibitors of medicinally significant enzymes.