Mark Hall
Title:
Professor of Biochemistry
PhD Granting Institution:
University of North Carolina
Contact:
Email Address: mchall@purdue.edu
Office Phone: 765-494-0714
Lab Website Link: https://ag.purdue.edu/department/biochem/labs/halllab/index.html
Primary Training Group:
Microbiology, Immunology and Infectious Diseases
Secondary Training Groups:
Cancer Biology
Research Areas:
Fungal Diseases - Invasive fungal infections are a serious world health problem, killing around 1.7 million people annually. Invasive fungal disease occurs primarily in the immune-compromised, including cancer chemotherapy and organ transplant patients, and individuals with immune system-weakening conditions like HIV and COVID-19 infections or diabetes mellitus. Antifungal drug options to combat invasive fungal diseases are limited, and drug resistance is becoming a significant challenge. There is a need to identify novel molecular targets and develop antifungal therapeutics directed against these targets to combat the rise of drug-resistant pathogen strains. A general interest of my research group is identification of new candidate antifungal drug targets, focusing on the Candida group of pathogenic yeasts.
Current Projects:
Fungal cell walls are structurally unique among eukaryotes, making them, and the enzymes that synthesize and regulate them, attractive targets for antifungal drugs. In fact, the successful echinocandin class of antifungal drugs (e.g. micafungin and caspofungin) act by inhibiting a key enzyme in fungal cell wall synthesis. Synthesis of the fungal cell wall must be tightly coordinated with cell growth during the cell division cycle. My research group is now focusing heavily on regulatory enzymes like phosphatases and kinases that play important roles in regulating fungal-specific aspects of the cell division cycle.
Importance of Interdisciplinary Research:
Yeasts are wonderful organisms to learn how to do science. They are as easy to grow and work with as bacteria. There are many genetic tools available to easily manipulate their genomes. Students working with our pathogenic yeast models will be conducting truly interdisciplinary research by learning and using modern methods for protein biochemistry, cell biology, and molecular genetics, including the use of state-of-the-art proteomic and genomic techniques. They will apply these methods to characterizing mechanisms of fungal pathogenesis and identifying new antifungal drug targets. We also collaborate with other labs on campus for drug discovery and design, structural biology, and to study virulence factors in animal models of invasive fungal diseases.