Catherine E. Leimkuhler Grimes

Biography

​B.S. - Villanova University (2001, Chemistry); M.S. - Princeton University (2003, Chemistry); Ph.D. - Harvard University (2007, Chemistry and Chemical Biology); Cancer Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital  (2007 - 2011, Molecular and Cellular Biology)

Current Research

The Grimes Research program focuses on the development and chemical synthesis of small molecule carbohydrate probes that mimic intermediates of bacterial cell wall biosynthesis and bacterial-host immune recognition. The Lab’s work encompassed a mixture of carbohydrate chemistry, molecular biology and biochemistry to answer questions regarding how the human body senses and responds to the presence of bacteria.

Dr. Leimkuhler Grimes is nationally recognized as a young leader in the field of chemical biology, as she has received numerous awards including a Pew Biomedical Scholars Award, a Cottrell Scholar, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. She received the American Chemical Society’s Infectious Disease Young Investigator Award and the Dryefus Teacher Scholar Award. She is the co-director of a NIH funded graduate program at the interface of chemistry and biology and the faculty mentor to a dynamic group of undergraduate STEM majors, “The Scientistas”

Representative publications

Lazor KM, Zhou J, DeMeester KE, D'Ambrosio EA, Grimes CL.* “Synthesis and Application of Methyl N,O-Hydroxylamine Muramyl Peptides”. Chembiochem. (2019) 20, 1269-1375.

DeMeester, KE, Liang, H, Jensen, M Jones, Z, D'Ambrosio, E, Scinto, S, Zhou, J, Grimes, CL.*,  “Synthesis of functionalized N-acetyl muramic acids to probe bacterial cell wall recycling and biosynthesis.” J. Am. Chem. Soc. (2018), 140, 9458-9465.

Schaefer AK, Wastyk HC, Mohanan V, Hou CW, Lauro ML, Melnyk JE, Burch JM, Grimes CL*. “Crohn's Disease Variants of Nod2 Are Stabilized by the Critical Contact Region of Hsp70” Biochemistry (2017), 56, 4445-4448.

Schaefer AK, Melnyk JE, Baksh MM, Lazor KM, Finn MG, Grimes CL*. “Membrane Association Dictates Ligand Specificity for the Innate Immune Receptor NOD2” ACS Chem Biol. (2017) 12, 2216-2224.

Liang H, DeMeester KE, Hou CW, Parent MA, Caplan JL, Grimes CL*. Metabolic labeling of the carbohydrate core in bacterial peptidoglycan and its applications. Nat Commun. (2017) 8, 15015.

Melnyk, J.E., Mohanan, V., Schaefer, A.K., Hou, C-H., Grimes, C.L. *, “Peptidoglycan Modifications Tune the Stability and Function of the Innate Immune Receptor Nod2”, J Am Chem Soc, (2015) 137, 6987.

Mohanan, V., Grimes, C.L.*, “The Molecular Chaperone HSP70 binds to and stabilizes NOD2, an important protein in Crohn’s Disease”, J. Biol. Chem, (2014), 289, 18987.