SRyou presenter spotlight: Nicole Martin

Editor’s note: The 10th annual SRyou Student Exposition, an all-day event featuring the work of Salve students, will be held Wednesday, March 27. In the weeks leading up to the exposition, SALVEtoday and the SRyou planning committee are featuring a series of presenter spotlights.

Chemistry major Nicole Martin ’19 will present a poster on her summer undergraduate research fellowship, “Exploring the Mechanism of Quorum Sensing Inhibition by Phenethylamide Derivatives.”

Martin writes: “In today’s world, bacteria are forming a resistance to modern day antibiotics creating a new hurdle for pharmaceutical scientists. Antibiotics are used to kill the bacteria that are making a patient ill, which can lead to the bacteria evolving to form a resistance to these antibiotics.

“Quorum sensing (QS) inhibition is an alternative method to antibiotics. QS allows bacteria to communicate with one another by the release and acceptance of molecules known as autoinducers. The focus of QS inhibition is to replace these autoinducers with another molecule preventing the bacteria from communicating and spreading virulence. Ongoing experiments and synthesis of new derivatives are underway in our laboratory in order to expand our library of QS inhibitors.”