Research

Discovery of New RiPP Pathways

The Chekan Lab is focused on the discovery of RiPP natural product biosynthetic pathways and uncovering the details of the enzymes that produce them. As their name suggests, RiPPs take peptides made by the ribosome and then use tailoring enzymes to modify them into complex, bioactive structures. The final compounds contain a wide variety of bioactivities including antibiotic, antimalarial, metal chelating, and cell signaling. Recent work has shown that there are many families of RiPPs waiting to be discovered. To accomplish this, the Chekan lab takes a bioinformics first approach to identify gene clusters that appear to encode for new RiPP natural products. We then evaluate this hypothesis by heterologously expressing both proteins and clusters in bacteria and rigorously examine the biochemical details of these new enzymes. To complement this in vitro approach, the authentic natural product from the original producing organism is isolated, characterized, and evaluated for bioactivity.