!Cancelled! Seminar Nigel Mouncey: ‘One Small Molecule for a Microbe, a Giant Leap for Natural Products’

Venue: Room M10
Speaker: Nigel Mouncey, Director of the Joint Genome Institute, CA (USA)
Contact: Marnix Medema

The galaxy of natural products comprises a large family of diverse and complex chemical entities that have roles in both primary and secondary metabolism, and today >23,000 natural products have been characterized. Secondary metabolites are incredibly important molecules for mankind with uses as antibiotics, antifungals, antitumour and antiparasitic products and in agriculture as products for crop protection and animal health. We are seeing a resurgence of activity in exploring secondary metabolites for a wide range of applications, due to not only increasing antibiotic resistance, but the advent of next-gen genome sequencing and new technologies to investigate natural product biosynthesis. At the JGI, we are developing new tools and processes for identification of novel biosynthetic gene clusters from isolate genomes and metagenomes, and complementing these with a suite of new experimental platforms to access the products of these clusters. We are currently analyzing >100,000 isolate genomes and >50,000 metagenomes and I will share recent results on these analyses, as well as how we are functionally expressing clusters in a range of novel chassis. Together, these capabilities represent a growing important resource for the natural products scientific user community.

Thursday, May 28, 2020
Time: 09:15
Radix building (nr. 107)
Droevendaalsesteeg 1, Wageningen