September 2018

Hello! This is my first blog post in my journey of volunteering at the KIPP Charter Schools in New Orleans. However, seeing I am still in the process of getting the logistics sorted out, I haven't officially started volunteering yet. While I definitely am looking forward to starting soon, in the meantime, I have been keeping busy with my schoolwork as a masters in pharmacology student in the Tulane University School of Medicine. The topics we have been covering recently are antibiotics, anti-fungals, anti-virals, HIV drugs, and the foundational basics of science research: microscopy, cell culture, animal research, and exciting, new stem cell therapies.

Something I found interesting in one of my lectures was the drug targets in antibiotic therapies. Considering bacteria is found EVERYWHERE, including the surface of our skin and in our gut, it poses a challenge to develop therapies that affect the cell processes of the virulent, deleterious bacteria that is causing disease and not the normal host cells of our bodies. One way to circumvent this problem was to identify the differences between the bacteria cells, which fall under the class of prokaryotes, and human cells, eukaryotes. Once we were able to do that, we could gear drug therapies towards the cellular mechanisms and structures that are present only in those damaging cells and not normal cells. Some of these differences include the peptidoglycan layer that surrounds gram+ bacteria, a target for drug therapies that disrupt the formation of this layer and thus prevent proper osmotic regulation, leading to cell lysis and death. Another difference is the ribosomal subunit that translates mRNA to peptides. While normal cells utilize ribosomal subunits as well, they differ in their structures, allowing protein synthesis in bacteria to be another target for potential drug therapies. Finally, while there are many other differences that are targets for therapies, the last one that stood out to me at first are the drugs that target the folic acid metabolism pathway that is specific to bacterial cells. While folic acid is necessary for humans as well, we are unable to undergo the synthesis pathway that allows us to make our own. Instead, we must source ours from our diet. Bacteria, on the other hand, makes their own.

I hope this little snapshot into the information we are learning in our class was as interesting to you as it is to me, and you leave this blog just a little more informed than when you arrived.

Till next time,

Lekha Thangada

September 30th, 2018

# of Volunteer hours (total): 0 hrs.