Demographics and Career Trends of Urology Fellowship Directors in the United States.

INTRODUCTION: Fellowship directors (FDs) hold significant leadership roles within the academic urology community. We sought to characterize common trends in training and academic productivity among urology FDs. Moreover, we aimed to characterize gender differences across subspecialties to better inform gender-based inclusion efforts and contemporary leadership pathways. METHODS: FDs were studied across 6 urologic subspecialties. Society and institutional websites were queried for demographics, education/training institutions, timelines of career milestones, and academic productivity. χ2, Mann-Whitney U, and Kruskal-Wallis tests and Kendall tau rank correlation were employed with an alpha cutoff of .05. RESULTS: There were 219 FDs included, representing 208 fellowship programs at 93 institutions. FDs were 176 (80%) males and 43 (20%) females. There was a significant association between gender and subspecialty. The median age for all FDs was 52 years old. Significant differences in age were demonstrated across subspecialties. For all FDs, females were younger than males, at 49 and 53 years, respectively (P = .001). The median H-index for all FDs was 23.5. H-index was significantly different between genders and subspecialities. There was a strong, positive correlation between age vs H-index for all FDs. Half of FDs had completed fellowship training at one of 14 institutions. CONCLUSIONS: We describe the landscape of leadership in urology subspecialty training. There are an increasing number of female FDs. Composition of leadership varies by subspecialty; however, the careers of all current urology FDs are marked by lifelong achievements in academic productivity. Moreover, a small group of institutions produce a substantial number of FDs.

Novel and Structurally Diversified Bacterial DNA Gyrase Inhibitors Discovered through a Fluorescence-Based High-Throughput Screening Assay.

Bacterial DNA gyrase, a type IIA DNA topoisomerase that plays an essential role in bacterial DNA replication and transcription, is a clinically validated target for discovering and developing new antibiotics. In this article, based on a supercoiling-dependent fluorescence quenching (SDFQ) method, we developed a high-throughput screening (HTS) assay to identify inhibitors targeting bacterial DNA gyrase and screened the National Institutes of Health's Molecular Libraries Small Molecule Repository library containing 370,620 compounds in which 2891 potential gyrase inhibitors have been identified. According to these screening results, we acquired 235 compounds to analyze their inhibition activities against bacterial DNA gyrase using gel- and SDFQ-based DNA gyrase inhibition assays and discovered 155 new bacterial DNA gyrase inhibitors with a wide structural diversity. Several of them have potent antibacterial activities. These newly discovered gyrase inhibitors include several DNA gyrase poisons that stabilize the gyrase-DNA cleavage complexes and provide new chemical scaffolds for the design and synthesis of bacterial DNA gyrase inhibitors that may be used to combat multidrug-resistant bacterial pathogens. Additionally, this HTS assay can be applied to screen inhibitors against other DNA topoisomerases.