Publications

2026

1. Huang, W., Berger, M. J., Safdari, H. A., Klepacki, D., Paternoga, H., Baliga, C., Wilson, D. N., Vázquez-Laslop, N., & Mankin, A. S. (2026). Flipping antimicrobial peptides in the exit tunnel of the bacterial ribosome. Nature Communications, 17, Article 4914. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74007-x

2024

2. Huang, W.*, Baliga, C.*, Aleksandrova, E. V., Atkinson, G., Polikanov, Y. S., Vázquez-Laslop, N., & Mankin, A. S. (2024). Activity, structure, and diversity of Type II proline-rich antimicrobial peptides from insects. EMBO reports, 25(11), 5194–5211. *Equal author contribution https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11549390/

3. Huang, W., Baliga, C., Vázquez-Laslop N, Mankin AS. (2024) ‘Sequence diversity of apidaecin-like peptides arresting the terminating ribosome’. Nucleic Acids Research, 52 (15), 8967-8978.  https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkae567 

2023

4. Mangano,K., Klepacki,D., Ohanmu, I., Baliga, C., Huang, W., Brakel, A., Krizsan, A., Polikanov, Y., Hoffmann, R., Vázquez-Laslop, N., and Mankin, A.S. (2023) ‘Inhibition of translation termination by Drosocin, an antibacterial peptide from fruit flies’, Nat Chem Biol. 19, 1082–1090 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-023-01300-x

5. Skowron KJ, Baliga C, Johnson T, Kremiller KM, Castroverde A, Dean TT, Allen AC, Lopez Hernandez AM, Aleksandrova EV, Klepacki D, Mankin AS, Polikanov YS, Moore TW. (2023), ‘Structure-activity relationships of the antimicrobial peptide natural product Apidaecin’, J Med Chem 66(17):11831-11842. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.3c00406

2021

6. Baliga, C.,* Brown TJ*, Florin T*, Colon S, Shah V, Skowron KJ, Kefi A, Szal T, Klepacki D, Moore TW, Vázquez-Laslop N, Mankin AS. (2021) ‘Charting the sequence-activity landscape of peptide inhibitors of translation termination’. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2021 Mar 9;118(10):e2026465118. *Equal author contribution  https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2026465118

2019

7. Baliga, C., Selmke, B., Worobiew, I., Borbat, P., Sarma, S. P., Trommer, W. E., Varadarajan, R., and Aghera, N. (2019) ‘CcdB at pH 4 Forms a Partially Unfolded State with a Dry Core’, Biophys J. 2019 Mar 5;116(5):807-817. https://www.cell.com/biophysj/fulltext/S0006-3495(19)30062-1

2016

8. Baliga, C., Majhi, S., Mondal, K., Bhattacharjee, A., VijayRaghavan, K., and Varadarajan, R. (2016) ‘Rational elicitation of cold-sensitive phenotypes’, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 113, E2506-2515. Highlighted in the “In this Issue” section of PNAS. “Generating cold-sensitive mutants”. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1604190113

9. Baliga, C., Varadarajan, R., and Aghera, N. (2016) ‘Homodimeric Escherichia coli Toxin CcdB Folds via Parallel Pathways’, Biochemistry 55, 6019-6031 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.biochem.6b00726

2013

10. Shukla, R. T., Baliga, C., and Sasidhar, Y. U. (2013) ‘The role of loop closure propensity in the refolding of Rop protein probed by molecular dynamics simulations’, J Mol Graph Model 40, 10-21. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1093326312001507

2008

11. Bajaj, K., Dewan, P. C., Chakrabarti, P., Goswami, D., Barua, B., Baliga, C., and Varadarajan, R. (2008) ‘Structural correlates of the temperature sensitive phenotype derived from saturation mutagenesis studies of CcdB’, Biochemistry 47, 12964-12973. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bi8014345