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Magdalene College
Cambridge
CB3 0AG

Dr Reynolds

Official Fellow, University Lecturer in Biochemistry and former Senior Tutor

Background

Dr Peter Reynolds has been a member of Magdalene College since 1957, first as an undergraduate specialising in Biochemistry, then as a research student working in the MRC Sub-department of Chemical Microbiology, as a Bye-Fellow and, finally, as a Fellow (1964), having been appointed to a University Lectureship in Biochemistry during that year. In College he has served as Director of Studies in Natural Sciences (Biological), as Tutor and as Senior Tutor. As a research scientist he was awarded a Royal Society Research Fellowship in 1963, a European Fellowship from the Royal Society in 1973 to carry out research in Liege and a CIBA Senior Fellowship for 1996 to work in the Pasteur Institute.

Research Interests

Dr Reynolds research centres on molecular mechanisms of resistance to antibiotics. He writes: "Antibiotic resistance has been the subject of considerable media exposure in recent years as the result of the emergence of bacterial strains that carry genes encoding resistance against virtually all the antibiotics in common use in hospitals. Fear has arisen that, if this information is transferred to important hospital pathogens, such strains might become virtually untreatable and this could lead to the end of the antibiotic era. It is therefore of prime importance to identify the molecular basis of the resistance mechanisms that have recently emerged so that a strategy can be evolved to overcome these mechanisms. My research is concerned with two groups of antibiotics - penicillins and cephalosporins, which remain the antibiotics of choice for many infections, and glycopeptide antibiotics which in some hospital situations have become the only antibiotics that remain active against the multiply resistant Staphylococcus aureus - the so-called 'super bug'. The aim of the research is to identify the genes involved in resistance, the function of the protein products in bacterial metabolism and the detailed 3-dimensional structure of these proteins, so that new molecules can be designed which might inhibit the proteins involved in the resistance mechanism."

Contact

Dr Reynolds can be contacted by:

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