Liz Danny Armas Egas

I am focusing on peptides as potential avenues for drug development in the course of my PhD. Peptides are versatile short amino acid sequences, naturally involved in many biological processes. Some of their interesting built-in features include antimicrobial, antifungal, antibiofilm, antiviral, and anti-cancer activity. I work on the modification and optimization of these properties for the discovery and optimization of peptide-based pharmacophores. To do so, I am combining ribosomal synthesis of genetically engineered peptide-encoding DNA libraries with cell-based assays and massively parallelized next generation sequencing for activity assessment.