SMBE Satellite Meeting: Evolutionary Biochemistry of Insect Antimicrobial Peptides
The SMBE Satellite Meeting on Evolutionary Biochemistry of Insect Antimicrobial Peptides will be held at the Elizabeth D. Rockwell Pavilion in the M.D. Anderson Library at the 葫芦影业 on Oct 13–15, 2025.
Information about travel, housing, and registration will be posted soon.
About the Meeting
Microbes that cause disease to humans, livestock, crops, and wild species are incredibly diverse and rapidly evolve resistance to existing antibiotic drugs. There is a critical need to develop novel antibiotics for the treatment of resistant and emerging microbial pathogens. The “Evolutionary Biochemistry of Insect Antimicrobial Peptides” conference will address this challenge by bringing together a diverse group of researchers with the common goal of leveraging naturally occurring molecules for the development of new antibiotics.
Naturally occurring insect antimicrobial peptides have tremendous promise to help address the challenge of antibiotic resistance, but realizing this potential requires transdisciplinary collaboration across disciplines including genomics, microbiology, biochemistry, data science, and engineering. The proposed conference will promote growth in this area by bringing together researchers from a variety of disciplines and career stages to understand modes of action and potential applications of insect AMPs as novel antibiotic agents.
Research areas covered by this conference will include:
- Phylogenetic and comparative genomics of arthropod antimicrobial peptides
- Novel antimicrobials, biomimetics design, and peptide biochemistry
- Microbiology, in vitro and in vivo experimentation
- Machine learning and data science
- Translational research
Invited Speakers
Danielle A. Garsin
Professor, McGovern Medical School, UTHealth Houston
“Antifungal Peptide Discovery and Development”
Dr. Garsin is a professor in the McGovern Medical School Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. She is interested in microbial pathogenesis, gene regulation, host-microbe, and microbe-microbe interactions. Her studies are centered on the biology of human bacterial pathogens such as Enterococcus faecalis. One research focus is the interactions between E. faecalis and the human fungal pathogen, Candida albicans. She and her collaborators discovered that the microbes inhibit each other’s virulence leading to the identification of compounds with potential for anti-infective therapeutic development. Dr. Garsin was elected as a Fellow to the American Academy for Microbiology in 2019. Dr. Garsin is also an associate editor of PLOS Genetics and on the editorial board of mBio.
Justin Randall
Assistant Professor, University of Missouri, Kansas City
“Methods for Examining Antimicrobial Peptide Membrane Specificity”
Dr. Randall is an Assistant Professor in Science and Engineering at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His main interest is finding new treatments for antimicrobial resistant infections, which are now among the leading causes of death worldwide. He is especially interested in using synthetic microbiology and biochemistry techniques to help find novel peptide antibiotics targeting essential processes on the bacterial cell surface and within the bacterial cell envelope. He also studies membrane disruptive peptides that target and kill cells via membrane lysis and are found naturally in toxins, venoms, and as part of host immune systems. His goal is to understand how we can modify AMPs to target specific disease causing cells (like bacteria, fungi, viruses, and cancers) without harming healthy human cells.
- Sarah Smith, Bucknell University (chemistry of cecropins)
- Alfredo Angeles-Boza, University of Connecticut (improving AMPs for therapeutics)
- Luis Pedro Coelho, Queensland University (global microbiomes)
- Dominique Ferrandon, University of Strasbourg (Drosophila AMP characterization)
- Andreas Vilcinskas, University of Giessen (insect AMP characterization)
- Danial Asgari, Vanderbilt University (beetle immunity and AMPs)
- Siva Sankari, The Stowers Institute for Medical Research (mode of AMP activity)
- Paul Straight, Texas A&M (microbial biochemistry, microbe/microbe interaction)
Thank You to Our Sponsors
Division of Research