News & Events

When

Date - April 6, 2018
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

What

Walter & Mary Elizabeth Glass Chair in Life Sciences; Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Professor of Chemistry, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Professor of Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine; Director of Proteomics Center of Excellence; Member of Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University

Abstract:

“Scalable Approaches to Harvest Drug-Leads from Bacteria and Fungi”

Bacteria and fungi offer many new compounds yet to be discovered and exploited as leads in drug discovery campaigns. Leveraging genome sequencing and modern mass spectrometry with accurate mass, two new and scalable approaches to identification of natural products and their biosynthetic gene clusters will be described. For action bacteria, the technique of “metabologenomics” has been reported and led to discovery of compounds like tobramycin-which harbors a new amino acid (ACS Cent Sci.2016, 2(2):99-108.). For fungi, the platform called “FAC-MS” uncovered 15 new systems in various species, including valactamide -a hybrid molecule made by hybrid polyketide/non-ribosomal peptide biosynthetic gene cluster (August 2017 cover article for Nature Chemical Biology).