UNC Asheville Undergraduate Helps Identify Promising Research To Fight Drug-Resistant Staph
This week, the University of North Carolina Asheville announced that a new paper led by Associate Professor of Biology Melinda R Grosser, Ph.D. , and undergraduate student Jenna Vidaud was published today in the peer-reviewed Journal of Bacteriology by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). The findings identify a promising new target for fighting Staphylococcus aureus, a leading cause of antibiotic-resistant infections in the U.S.
The discovery: disabling a single enzyme can strip one of the world's most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria of much of its power to harm — without a single antibiotic.
The four-year study led by Professor Grosser, Ph.D., and her team of 12 UNC Asheville undergraduate co-authors, was conducted in the Department of Biology, in collaboration with Caitlin McMahon, Ph. D. in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry. Vidaud, who graduated from UNC Asheville last spring with a double major in Biology and Chemistry & Biochemistry, led the project as part of their undergraduate research. Several students, including Vidaud, wrote senior theses based on the work. The first thesis, which contributed to securing funding for the project, came from second author Jackson Coker, one of the project’s earliest contributors and now a medical student at East Tennessee State University.
“We were excited to find that this enzyme hardly matters during normal growth but becomes critical during conditions bacteria would face in a host,” said Professor Grosser. “That vulnerability makes it a promising target for new drugs that lessen the ability of S. aureus to cause disease, without imposing the same selective pressure to evolve resistance as drugs that kill bacteria directly.”
The team focused on an enzyme called YqeK, which S. aureus relies on to clear a stress-signaling molecule that builds up under harsh conditions — like those it encounters inside the human body. When the researchers removed YqeK, the bacteria grew normally under everyday lab conditions but struggled when conditions turned hostile. Just as strikingly, the crippled bacteria became noticeably less toxic, losing much of their ability to destroy red blood cells, a strong signal that they would cause milder disease during a real infection.
The study was funded by the American Heart Association, awarded to Grosser in 2023, with additional support from the UNC Asheville Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Program, the Steve and Frosene Zeis Professorship, the Chemistry Scholars Program Early Undergraduate Research Fellowship (NSF S-STEM Grant 1833604), and the Forrest Fund for Undergraduate Research.
