University of St Andrews
Duncan Smith I am a bioorganic chemist/chemical biologist with research interests in the biosynthesis of natural products at the chemical and genetic level. Specifically, my research focuses on natural products with important medicinal properties and in understanding how biosynthetically intriguing motifs within these compounds are assembled. From this vantage point we harness individual enzymes as convenient tools for organic synthesis, and employ … Read more
I am a highly motivated BioOrganic Medicinal Chemist with research interests in the synthesis, biosynthesis and biosynthetic manipulation of natural products. Through my MSc I have developed skills in organic synthesis and I have extended these skills in biochemistry further through my PhD. I have a deep interest in the medical research field especially in the discovery … Read more
I am a Molecular Microbiologist with research interests in the development of whole cell catalysts, with particular focus on engineering microbial biofilms as platform for biotransformations. Biofilms are known for their robustness and ability to withstand harsh environmental conditions, therefore I am working toward harnessing these features to develop a biocatalytic biofilm platform in which enzymes of choice are … Read more
I am an organic/bioorganic chemist with research interests in the synthesis and biosynthesis of natural products. My previous work has included the synthesis and isolation of highly reactive superelectrophile compounds and the synthesis of fluorinated derivatives of natural products. My current research focuses on marrying biosynthesis and synthetic chemistry to generate new natural product analogues. Michael Corr’s CV
My research work focused on the natural products chemistry, including the isolation and structure determination of new bioactive natural, genome mining, and genetic manipulation of bioactive natural product biosynthesis. I have developed skills in the isolation and purification, structure elucidation, organic synthesis of natural products through my MSc and PhD. After that, my research centres on the screening of … Read more
I am a synthetic chemist/ chemical biologist with a particular interest in the biosynthesis of natural products, and am especially fascinated by the enzymes involved in in sugar and nucleoside biosynthesis and modification. I am passionate about biocatalysis, considering it the most striking and environmentally-friendly approach to synthesis. I am currently working on a very interdisciplinary project, combining … Read more
Allomerus ants ensure that they have sufficient nitrogen in their diet by trapping and consuming other insects. In order to construct their traps, like the more extensively studied leaf cutter ants, they employ fungal farming. Pest management within these fungal cultures has been speculated to be due to the ants’ usage of actinomycetes capable of producing … Read more
A new family of radical halogenases has been discovered that regio- and stereoselectively chlorinates the unactivated carbon center of indolemonoterpenoid substrates without the prerequisite for the substrate to be bound to a protein carrier. Goss RJM, Grüschow S Nature Chemical Biology 2014, 10, 878
The pacidamycin and muraymycin uridyl peptide antibiotics show some structural resemblance to an Arg-Trp-x-x-Trp sequence motif for protein–protein interaction between bacteriophage X174 protein E and E. coli translocase MraY. Members of the UPA class, and a synthetic uridine–peptide analogue, were found to show reduced levels of inhibition to F288L or E287A mutant MraY enzymes, implying that the UPAs … Read more
Access to natural products and their analogues is crucial. Such compounds have, for many years, played a central role in the area of drug discovery as well as in providing tools for chemical biology. The ability to quickly and inexpensively acquire genome sequences has accelerated the field of natural product research. Access to genomic data … Read more