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Intro

Patrick Loll, PhD, is an experienced protein biochemist, structural biologist and protein biophysicist. His group has experience with a wide range of biochemical and biophysical techniques. Throughout his career, Loll’s work has centered around the expression, purification, crystallization and structure determination of both soluble and membrane-bound proteins. He joined Drexel University in 2001.

How would you explain your current research?

We’re interested in molecular structure, and how it controls function. To address this, we use a range of different tools—for structure, we use X-ray crystallography, as well as other approaches, and to address function, we rely on a range of biochemical and biophysical approaches, depending on the precise question we’re studying. Once you’ve assembled a toolbox like this, you can apply it to pretty much any area of biology, and historically we have used our tools to study a broad range of different scientific questions, relating to both prokaryotic and eukaryotic biology. Right now, we’re focusing primarily on two areas: First, we’re deciphering how bacteria evade the action of vancomycin and related antibiotics. This is a pressing clinical concern, since the spread of antibiotic resistance is threatening our ability to control infection. We hope to generate insights that will lead to the development of novel antibiotics and/or antibiotic adjuvants that will help push back against resistant pathogens. Secondly, we’re probing the so-called Ton system, which allows Gram-negative bacteria to take up key nutrients such as iron. This system helps make pathogens more virulent, and so we hope that a better structural and mechanistic understanding of it might suggest novel antibiotic targets.

What interested you in this field?

In both cases, we got into these areas through collaboration. I first became interested in vancomycin because a colleague down the hall needed a better understanding of the antibiotic’s structure than he could get from existing data; he recruited me to the problem, and we became one of the first groups to determine the atomic structure of vancomycin. As for the Ton system, an old friend who works in a related area introduced me to it, and he and I spent many hours debating how the system might actually work. Finally, we just decided to move beyond discussion and actually do the experiments.

Did you always plan on becoming a professor? Did you have any back-up career ideas?

I’m a first-generation college student, so it’s fair to say that being a professor was never on my radar while I was growing up. When I got to college and discovered biochemical research, I just wanted to be able to keep doing it. I also found that I enjoyed teaching, and so I naturally fell into the academic track. I guess my back-up career plan was to become a chemical engineer, but the petrochemical industry never appealed to me, so I’m happy I wound up where I did.