| Citation | Julian Davies began his biological work studying the mode of action of antibiotics in relation to the structure and function of ribosomes. He showed that streptomycin induced translation errors by a misreading of the code. He continued to work on the structure and function of bacterial ribosomes and was able to characterize mutants in several ribosome genes and, through an analysis of sensitivity and resistance to the antibiotic kasugamycin, isolated the first mutants which affected the post-transcriptional modification of ribosomal RNA. His main work has been on the biochemical mechanisms of resistance to antibodies in clinical isolates of bacteria harboring resistance plasmids. He demonstrated the specificity of O-phosphorylation, O-adenylylation and N-acetylation of aminoglycoside antibiotics and was the first to suggest that resistance genes originally came from the producing organisms and spread by horizontal gene transfer. This has been borne out by research on drug-resistance elements. |