News & Events

When

Date - October 22, 2021
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

What

Assistant Professor
Department of Chemistry
Virginia Tech
Talk Title: Bacterial Symbionts as Sources for New Bioactive Small Molecules

Abstract:

Natural products have played a critical role in drug discovery and innovation for many decades – roughly 65% of all approved small molecule drugs are either natural products, derivatives, or embody a natural product pharmacophore. This is especially true for the treatment of infectious diseases, including viral and fungal pathogens, both of which have significant and growing unmet needs for new therapeutic agents. The success of natural products in the clinic is due to their evolutionary history, their structures and functions having evolved over millions of years of selective pressures to carry out an essential role for the producing organism. One particularly important role is the production of defensive metabolites by symbiotic microorganisms to protect their eukaryotic host. Recent investigations into two bacterial symbionts from distinct ecosystems – moon snail egg masses and fungus-growing ants – has led to the discovery of two new bacterial metabolites that likely defend the host from pathogens and predation. Both bacterial strains showed impressive antifungal activity in binary intruder assays and were prioritized for mass spectrometry-based metabolomics analysis using GNPS. GNPS utilizes tandem mass spectrometry to cluster putative metabolites based on relatedness of the observed fragmentation pattern. Two intriguing clusters were identified as they appeared to contain new chemistry. Isolation and structure elucidation of one of the metabolites has revealed a novel class of highly modified terpene, including a C35 carbon backbone, high degree of oxidation, and new sugar moiety. This unprecedented structure raises additional unanswered biosynthetic questions and potential biomedical applications.