Erdal Toprak

Erdal Toprak is a Professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he leads the Toprak Lab. His research bridges molecular biology, evolutionary dynamics, and microfluidics to study antibiotic resistance and phenotypic diversity in bacteria.

• PhD in Computational Biology and Biophysics (2007) from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying molecular motor proteins with Paul R. Selvin.
• Postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School with Roy Kishony's Lab, focusing on antibiotic resistance evolution.
• Developed the morbidostat, an automated device for continuous-culture bacterial evolution studies.

Research Interests:

• Evolutionary dynamics of antibiotic resistance under sustained drug selection.
• Quantitative systems biology using microfluidic tools.
• Molecular mechanisms of drug efflux proteins (e.g., TolC).
• Epistatic interactions in enzyme inhibition and resistance evolution.
• Development of rapid diagnostics for pathogen detection.
• Exploiting evolutionary tradeoffs to combat resistance.

Recent Trends in Publications: Toprak's 2023-2025 work focuses on structural shifts in TolC for β-lactam resistance, higher-order epistasis in resistance evolution, and non-conserved drug interactions in AML cell lines. Earlier studies (2006-2013) pioneered super-resolution imaging techniques (FIONA, DOPI) for molecular motor analysis.

Lab & Collaborations: The Toprak Lab employs whole-genome sequencing, combinatorial mutagenesis, and microfluidics to map genotype-phenotype relationships. Collaborations include Roy Kishony (Harvard) and Paul Selvin (UIUC).