Dr Jennifer Tomlinson

Jennifer was awarded a Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship by the Royal Society to study the role of allostery and protein dynamics in antibiotic resistance. The rise in antibiotic resistance is threatening our ability to treat bacterial infections and without action it has been predicted that antimicrobial resistance will overtake cancer as a cause of death by 2050. To try to overcome existing resistance mechanisms we need to understand them in molecular detail. Jennifer’s research makes use of NMR spectroscopy along with other biochemical and biophysical techniques to characterize the mechanisms of resistance to two clinically important antibiotics for which allostery and dynamics are important. This research will give a detailed understanding of a novel antibiotic resistance mechanism and may also identify druggable ‘hot spots’ to try to disrupt the resistance.