Abstract:

Natural products are historically great sources of human medicines, but their impacts are well beyond their use as drugs. In addition to well-known producers like environmental microbes and plants, the human microbiome is an emerging source of new natural products that often correlate with health or disease. There is an urgent need for the experimental characterization of these abundant, yet poorly understood, molecules and the downstream socio-chemical relationships they mediate. In the first half of my lecture, I will introduce efforts from my group on the discovery and functional study of new bioactive natural products, particularly from the human oral microbiome. In the second half, I will discuss our work on understanding natural product biosynthesis, which makes it possible to produce more bioactive natural products and their analogs via synthetic biology and yield useful enzymes for biocatalysis. Our recent efforts on discovering and characterizing N-N bond-forming enzymes will be highlighted.