PhD student, Cellular and Molecular Biology
Faculty advisor: Srivatsan Raman
Silas Miller is a PhD student in Cellular and Molecular Biology from Seattle, Washington. As a member of the Raman Lab, Silas studies a type of protein that pumps antibiotics out of bacteria and makes them drug resistant, called an efflux pump.
One efflux pump can recognize and expel many different types of antibiotics, even if they look different from each other, Silas said. He focuses on understanding how these proteins recognize antibiotics, and what other features are important for causing drug resistance. In the past year, Silas has published a first-author articles in Cell Chemical Biology on this work, and a second manuscript — currently under peer review — is available as a preprint on bioRxiv.
“Understanding how multidrug efflux pumps work could help us think of new ways to inhibit them,” he said. “If we can block multidrug efflux pumps and prevent them from exporting antibiotics, it could make some drug-resistant bacteria sensitive to antibiotics again.”
Furthermore, Silas said multidrug efflux pumps have a unique strategy to recognize many different drugs at once. By studying how this recognition works, he hopes researchers can learn more about how to design new proteins that bind to other types of molecules. This knowledge could be useful for efficiently producing chemicals or biofuels using microbes.
Silas received WARF funding in fall 2021. He said the funding has allowed him to focus on his research and career development during graduate school. “That’s been very important for making steady progress on my project and building my skills as a scientist,” he said.
This year, Silas received a F31 grant from the National Institutes of Health. He will use the award to pursue research on how multidrug transporter proteins recognize antibiotics and how this relates to their ability to use energy efficiently.