Steven M. Musser US Food and Drug Administration Office: 301-436-1990 FAX: 301-436-2624 E-mail: steven.musser@cfsan.fda.gov Job Title: Lead Scientist Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Maryland, Baltimore

Speaker: Steven M. Musser, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, US Food and Drug Administration, College Park, MD 20740

Topic: Discovery of Specific Biomarkers for the Differentiation of Pathogenic Bacteria

Place: Building 549, Auditorium, NCI at Frederick, Frederick, MD

Time: Tuesday, December 9, 2003, at 2:00 PM

Abstract: Pathogenic bacteria represent a constantly evolving, serious public health problem that results in millions of cases of human illness each year. As part of our ongoing research to combat this problem, with the specific aim of developing better diagnostic assays, new analytical tools have been developed for the discovery of protein biomarkers representative of pathogenic strains of bacteria. By combining mass spectrometry with custom developed data analysis software, accurate intact protein expression profiles can be generated among species or strains of bacteria. Further analysis of these expression profiles can be performed to identify specific proteins common only to pathogenic strains within a species of bacteria. Sequence information obtained from the biomarker proteins can then be used to develop specific molecular probes or immunologic assays for the individual pathogenic strains. The above approach has been used to investigate the protein expression profiles of a number of pathogenic bacteria and has identified several unique proteins characteristic of the pathogenic strains.

The slides to this seminar are in a 0.9 Megabyte PDF file, which can be opened and read by using the free Adobe Acrobat Reader®.