Barlow Lab

Research

Our research focuses on the evolution of antimicrobial resistance. Antimicrobial resistance is a serious problem affecting thousands of lives each year. Recent outbreaks of Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) have illustrated the severity of the resistance problem. Reports in the popular press (New York Times, Oct 16, 2007) have identified MRSA as a greater health threat than HIV. However, the health threats posed by MRSA are only a small fraction of the antimicrobial resistance problem. The causative agents of deadly diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia are also becoming resistant to nearly all existing antibiotics as well. Our lab is investigating several approaches to combat the threat of resistance.

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Recent Publications

Barlow M, Kirkup B. “Evolving Antibiotic Resistance”. In Detection and Characterization of Antibiotic Resistance. In: In Press. Forthcoming.
Crona K, Greene D, Barlow M. The peaks and geometry of fitness landscapes. Journal of theoretical biology. 2013;317:1–10.
McQueary CN, Kirkup BC, Si Y, Barlow M, Actis LA, Craft DW, Zurawski D V. Extracellular stress and lipopolysaccharide modulate Acinetobacter baumannii surface-associated motility. Journal of microbiology. 2012;50(3):434–443.
Francino P. The ecology of bacterial genes and the survival of the new. International journal of evolutionary biology. 2012;2012.
Seronello S, Montanez J, Presleigh K, Barlow M, Park SB, Choi J. Ethanol and reactive species increase basal sequence heterogeneity of hepatitis C virus and produce variants with reduced susceptibility to antivirals. PLoS One. 2011;6(11):e27436.
De Vries LE, Vallès Y, Agers\o Y, Vaishampayan PA, ia-Montaner AG \, Kuehl J V, Christensen H, Barlow M, Francino P. The gut as reservoir of antibiotic resistance: microbial diversity of tetracycline resistance in mother and infant. PloS one. 2011;6(6):e21644.