Manuel F Varela, Ph.D.

Affiliations:	1987	Biochemistry	University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, United States
	1994	Biomedical Sciences	University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center
	1994-1997		Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
	1997-	Biology	Eastern New Mexico University

Area:

antimicrobial resistance, transporter, antiporter motif, major facilitator superfamily

Website:

https://enmu.academia.edu/MVarela

Google:

"https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=jMM_FDoAAAAJ&hl=en"

Bio:

Manuel Varela is a native New Mexican, born and raised in Santa Fe. As a Ph.D. student at UNM, Varela studied antibiotic resistance and found evidence for the functional role of an amino acid sequence motif that’s highly conserved in antibiotic efflux pumps. After graduation, Varela went to Harvard as a postdoctoral fellow and studied the lactose permease from Escherichia coli in the laboratory of Prof. Thomas Wilson. While at Harvard, Varela taught first-year medical students in a course Chemistry and Biology of a Cell and helped discover an intra-helical salt bridge. Varela returned to New Mexico as a faculty at ENMU to teach microbiology and conduct research on bacterial transporters and antibiotic resistance. Since promotion to professor in 2008, Dr. Varela has published numerous primary papers in peer-refereed journals, plus review articles and book chapters; his laboratory also determined the complete genome sequence of a non-O1 Vibrio cholerae bacterium and conducted a genomic comparison with its pathogenic counterpart. Varela published his first book in 2018 about the discoveries of the world's most famous scientists!

Research Interests
The Varela research laboratory is interested in molecular microbial physiology of bacterial resistance to antimicrobial agents. We study bacterial multi-drug efflux pumps from the major facilitator superfamily of solute transporters. Our laboratory discovered the multi-drug efflux pumps LmrS from Staphylococcus aureus and EmrD-3 from Vibrio cholerae. We also collaboratively determined the complete genome sequence of a non-O1 V. cholerae genome. We are always interested in outstanding graduate students to work in our lab and to complete their MS theses.
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