Antimicrobial Peptides

Dr. Hicks received her B.S. in Chemistry at Marshall University, summa cum laude, and Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she was the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She was an Assistant Member and Principal Investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and an adjunct professor in the Department of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis prior to assuming her current role as a professor in the Department of Chemistry at UNC.

1. Unifying the classification of antimicrobial peptides in the Antimicrobial Peptide Database 2. Protocols for measuring the stability and cytotoxicity of cyclotides 3. Optimizing peptide library creation for PepSAVI-MS (RP libraries, etc) 4. Screening for cysteine-stabilized scaffolds for developing protelytic-resistant AMPs 5. Exploring synergy and its role in antimicrobial peptide biology 6. Colorimetric assays for the rapid and high-throughput screening of antimicrobial peptide activity against diverse bacterial pathogens 7. In silico prediction and mass spectrometric characterization of botanical antimicrobial peptides 8. Combined Thermal and Carboxypeptidase Y Stability Assays for Proving the Threaded Fold of Lasso Peptides 9. Evaluation of endogenous peptide stereochemistry using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry-based spiking experiments 10. Multiplexed Quantitative Neuropeptidomics via DiLeu Isobaric Tagging 11. In vitro evaluation of antibiotic resistance via proteomics 12. Molecular Networking-based Strategies in Mass Spectrometry Coupled with in silico Dereplication of Peptidic Natural Products and Gene Cluster Analysis 13. Methods for the design and characterization of peptide antibiotics 14. Quick synthesis of novel antimicrobial peptoids with a- and ß-chiral side chains 15. Molecular networking in infectious disease models