Egan G
Rachelle Kun
A native of Green Bay, Wisconsin, he grew to love Lake Michigan by spending summer weekends and vacations on the Door Peninsula, where both sets of his grandparents had summer homes. After graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in history in 1989, Egan moved out West and worked as an assistant park historian at Yellowstone National Park. In 1992 he began his newspaper career at the Idaho Mountain Express in Sun Valley Idaho. From there he moved on to newspapers in Idaho Falls, Idaho and Salt Lake City, Utah. During his decade out West Egan covered a range of environmental issues, including efforts to restore threatened and endangered species like wolves, salmon and grizzly bears. He also covered the Alpine skiing for the Salt Lake Tribune during the 2002 Winter Games. Egan moved back to Wisconsin in 2002, and lives with his wife and four children in the Milwaukee suburb of Whitefish Bay.
Susan Egan earned a B. S. in biology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1984), a PhD in microbiology from Cornell University (1991), and was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Robert Schleif at the Johns Hopkins University. She began her faculty position at the University of Kansas in 1994, initially in the Department of Microbiology, and following the merger of several departments, in the current Department of Molecular Biosciences. She is also an affiliate member of the Center for Computational Biology. Dr. Egan was promoted to Professor in 2009. She served as Associate Chair of Molecular Biosciences from 2008 through 2012, and currently serve as departmental Chairperson (since 2014). Research in the Egan lab focuses on the mechanisms used by bacterial transcriptional activator proteins to increase expression of specific genes under appropriate environmental conditions. Understanding these mechanisms is critical to the goal of targeting activators of virulence factor expression in bacterial pathogens as a method to prevent or ameliorate disease. Indeed, the lab has published a number of studies toward this goal. The Egan lab uses a variety of techniques including genetics, biochemistry, protein structure determination, protein-DNA interaction, and computational methods.
My primary research interest is understanding the regulation of gene expression (especially positive regulation) at a molecular level. In our lab we examine the molecular biology of gene regulation in E. coli, with a focus on the L-rhamnose catabolic genes, and the fact that the L-rhamnose regulator genes are members of the AraC family of regulatory proteins. Many AraC family proteins are regulators of virulence factors in bacterial pathogens, therefore, we use the L-rhamnose regulators as models to understand the function of proteins in this family. Our ultimate goal is to identify small molecules that block the function of AraC family proteins and have potential as anti-bacterial agents.
We have already obtained a substantial amount of information about RhaS function. For example, we have identified four amino acid residues in RhaS that make base-specific contacts with its DNA-binding site, and further, have identified the base-pairs in the DNA that each of these residues contacts. This allows us to unequivocally orient each monomer of the RhaS dimer on its DNA site. We have also identified two amino acid residues in RhaS that are directly required to contact RNA polymerase to activate transcription. In addition, we have identified the amino acid residues in the sigma70 subunit of RNA polymerase that each of these RhaS residues contacts. There are only very few transcription activators for which interactions with RNA polymerase have been defined at this level of detail. We are currently investigating the mechanisms by which RhaS: dimerizes; binds its ligand, L-rhamnose; and transmits the information that L-rhamnose is or is not available from its N-terminal ligand binding and dimerization domain to its C-terminal DNA-binding and transcription activation domain.
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