..:: Cavanagh lab ::..

What the Cavanagh lab is all about

Our group is generally interested in how the specific structure and inherent flexibility of proteins helps them carry out their biological roles. For a few years and with some success, we have been focusing on proteins involved in bacterial response and protection. Proteins responsible for keeping bacteria alive. If you want to see what we're doing in this regard, flip around the website a little and maybe look at a couple of examples of our publications (listed below).

We have also embarked on a major program looking at proteins involved in bacterial competence (picking up exogenous DNA and internalizing these fragments into the cell). This is pretty new to us so we can't show you any papers yet, but we have some beautiful NMR spectra so far.

In a similar fashion we have recently expanded our efforts into the world of calcium-binding proteins, but with the same goals as above. This work just got funded. There's more about this on our research interests section.

We use NMR as our big platform technology, but we are pretty well-rounded when it comes to addressing our research problems. We'll try anything. Consequently some sophisticated mass spectrometry is becoming a major player in our work.

Recent Publications

Inhibition and dispersion of proteobacterial biofilms. Justin J. Richards, Robert W. Huigens III, T. Eric Ballard, Anne Basso, John Cavanagh and Christian Melander Chem Commun., (2008) 1698-1700

Targeting RNA with cysteine-constrained peptides. Virginia A. Burns, Benjamin G. Bobay, Anne Basso, John Cavanagh, Christian Melander Bioorg Med Chem Lett. (2007)

NMR assignment of the N-terminal repeat domain of Bacillus subtilis ClpC. Kojetin D.J., McLaughlin P.D., Thompson R.J., Venters R.A, Rance M., Cavanagh J. J of Bio NMR. (2007)

Tandem mass spectrometry acquisition approaches to enhance identifcation of protein-protein interactions using low-energy collision-induced dissociative chemical crosslinking reagents. Soderblom E.J., Bobay B.G., Cavanagh J., Goshe M.B. Rapid Communications in Mass Spec. (2007) 21: 3395-3408

Peptide binding proclivities of calcium loaded calbindin-D28k. Kordys DR, Bobay BG, Thompson RJ, Venters RA, Cavanagh J. FEBS Letters (2007) 581, : 4778-4782

Abh and AbrB control of Bacillus subtilis antimicrobial gene expression. Strauch MA, Bobay BG, Cavanagh J, Yao F, Wilson A, Breton YL. Journal of Bacteriology (2007)