Bacterial cell surface membrane proteins provide accessible targets for small molecule inhibitors, and also provide surface accessible epitopes that can serve as antigens in the implementation of vaccines against pathogens—thus an understanding of their structure and function provides useful insights into the development of new therapeutics against bacterial pathogens. Dr. Moraes’ research focuses on understanding the mechanisms of outer membrane proteins that function in nutrient transport across the Gram negative bacterial cell envelop. Dr. Moraes will continue to use this information to develop vaccines based on engineering these surface proteins into antigens that can protect against invasive disease.

Selected publications:

1. Hooda, Y., Lai, C.C., Judd, A., Buckwalter, C., Shin, H.E., Gray-Owen, S.D., and Moraes, T.F. Slam is an outer membrane protein that is required for the surface display of lipidated virulence factors in Neisseria Nature Microbiology 2016, Feb 29. 1:16009. doi: 10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.9.
2. Brandon Sit, Kirandeep Bhullar, Christine Chieh-Lin Lai, Calvin Tang, Yogesh Hooda, Calmettes, C., Husain Khambati, Caixia Ma, John H. Brumell, Anthony B. Schryvers, Bruce A. Vallance, and Trevor F. Moraes. Active Transport of Phosphorylated Carbohydrates Promotes Intestinal Colonization and Transmission of a Bacterial Pathogen. PLoS Pathog. 2015 Aug 21;11(8):e1005107. doi: 10.1371
3. Calmettes, C., Ing, C., Buckwalter, C.M., El-Bakkouri, M., Lai, C.C.L., Pogoutse, A.K., Gray-Owen, S.D., Pomès, R., and Moraes, T.F. The molecular mechanism of Zinc acquisition by the Neisserial outer-membrane receptor ZnuD. Nature Communications 2015 Aug 18;6:7996. doi: 10.1038/ncomms8996.
4. Calmettes, C., Alcantara, J.,Yu, R.H., Schryvers, A.B. and Moraes, T.F. The structural basis of transferrin sequestration by transferrin-binding protein B. Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. 2012 19(3):358-60.
5. Babu, M., *Bundalovic-Torma, C., *Calmettes, C., Phanse, S., Zhang, Q., Jiang, Y., Minic, Z., Kim, S., Mehla, J., Gagarinova, A., Rodionova, I., Kumar, A., Guo, H., Kagan, O., Pogoutse, O., Aoki, H., Deineko, V., Caufield, J. H., Holtzapple, E., Zhang, Z., Vastermark, A., Pandya, Y., Lai, C. C.-l., El Bakkouri, M., Hooda, Y., Shah, M., Burnside, D., Hooshyar, M., Vlasblom, J., Rajagopala, S. V., Golshani, A., Wuchty, S., F Greenblatt, J., *Saier, M., *Uetz, P., *Moraes, T.F., *Parkinson, J., and *Emili, A. (2018) Global landscape of cell envelope protein complexes in Escherichia coli. Nature Biotechnology 2018 Jan;36(1):103-112. doi: 10.1038/nbt.4024. Epub 2017 Nov 27.