P.M.M. van der Velden (Pieter)
PhD candidate - Microbiology
Heyendaalseweg 135
6525 AJ NIJMEGEN
Internal postal code: 72
Tuberculosis (TB) causes over a million deaths globally per year. TB is caused by M. tuberculosis, a bacterium notorious for its resilience against antibiotics and attacks from the immune system. Approximately 30% of M. tuberculosis genes are annotated as hypothetical conserved protein and many more are only annotated at the class-level. Thus, there is still a great deal of proteins with unknown functions, many of whom may be important to the pathophysiology of M. tuberculosis and could consequently be promising drug targets for the treatment of TB. We are developing new omics-based methodology that allows us to link enzymatic activity with M. tuberculosis proteins of unknown function on an unprecedented scale. With this method we are aiming to reveal new targets for the treatment of TB and develop new generally applicable tools for functional gene annotation.