Barry P. Rosen, Ph.D., investigates the mechanisms of transport and detoxification of transition metals, heavy metals, and metalloids in bacteria, yeast, protozoans, mammals and plants. He has been continuously funded by the National Institutes for Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation since 1972. Rosen held a prestigious MERIT Award which was renewed as an R01, and most recently as a MIRA Award until 2025, putting it within the top 100 longest continuously funded NIH grants.
Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest public health threats of our time. There is a pressing need for new and novel antibiotics to combat the rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria worldwide.
The Rosen Lab is part of an international team that discovered a new broad-spectrum antibiotic that contains arsenic.
Rosen has identified the following:
- Pathways of arsenic uptake, efflux, biotransformation and regulation in organisms from colito humans
- Most of the known arsenic detoxification genes and characterized their gene products at the biochemical and structural level
- He solved the crystal structure of the ArsA As(III)-translocating ATPase, the ArsR repressor orthologue CadC, the ArsC and LmAcr2 arsenate reductases, the ArsH NADPH-FMN oxidoreductase, the ArsD As(III) metallochaperone, the ArsM As(III)-SAM methyltransferases from Cyanidioschyzon merolae and Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and most recently the ArsI C-As lyase.
- He identified and named the ArsR family of metalloregulatory proteins.
- He made the seminal discovery that aquaglyceroporin channels, from E. coli GlpF to human AQP9, are the transporters that nearly every cell uses to take up As(III)
He is currently elucidating the enzymes and transporters of the arsenic biomethylation and organoarsenical redox cycles.
Barry P. Rosen is a distinguished professor in the Department of Cellular Biology and Pharmacology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy for Microbiology (ASM) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
His lab is located in the 3rd and 4th floors of Academic Health Center 1.