Directing Biosynthesis VII

Christine Beemelmanns is a Professor of Medicinal-Pharmaceutical Microbiota Research at Saarland University, affiliated with the Helmholtz-Institut für Pharmazeutische Forschung Saarland (HIPS). Her research seamlessly integrates natural product chemistry, applied microbiology, and organic chemistry, aiming to both chemically and functionally characterize microbial signaling and defense molecules across various symbiotic model systems. The analysis of ancient and evolved microbial interactions enables her to discover unprecedented chemical core structures with significant pharmaceutical potential.

Christine's academic journey commenced with the study of Chemistry at RWTH Aachen. After completing her degree, she embarked on a one-year research stay in Japan with Prof. Sodeoka at RIKEN. Upon returning to Germany, she conducted research at FU Berlin under the guidance of Prof. Reißig, culminating in the attainment of her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry. Following this, she spent an additional six months in Japan at the University of Tokyo under the supervision of Prof. K. Suzuki. Subsequently, in 2011, she joined the group of Prof. Clardy at Harvard Medical School (Boston).

In 2013, Christine received a call from the Hans-Knöll Institute (HKI), inviting her to serve as a Junior Research Group leader in the field of Natural Products Chemistry and Chemical Biology. In 2020, she was elected as the Margaret L. and Harlan L. Goering Visiting Professor in Organic Chemistry at UW Madison during the spring term. In 2022, she was appointed as a Professor for Biochemistry of Microbial Metabolism at Leipzig University, before relocating later that year to Saarland University, in collaboration with HIPS.

Greg Challis graduated with a BSc in Chemistry (1994) from Imperial College London and a DPhil in Organic Chemistry (1998) from the University of Oxford, for research carried out under the supervision of Sir Jack Baldwin. He carried out postdoctoral research as a Wellcome Trust International Prize Travelling Research Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, USA, with Prof Craig Townsend (1998-2000) and in the Department of Genetics at John Innes Centre, UK, with Prof Keith Chater (2000-2001). In 2001 he took up a lectureship in Chemical Biology in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick and in 2006 he was promoted to Professor. In July 2016, he was appointed as the Monash-Warwick Alliance Professor of Sustainable Chemistry (Chemical and Synthetic Biology), a joint position between the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick, and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. In 2020, he co-founded the University of Warwick spinout company Erebagen, and in 2021 he became co-director of the Monash-Warwick Alliance Major Research Initiative in Emerging Superbug Threats and a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Innovations in Peptide and Protein Science (CIPPS). 

Greg’s research interests encompass the discovery, mechanism of action, biosynthesis, bioengineering and evolution of bioactive natural products. His research has been recognised by numerous awards, most recently a Wolfson Research Merit Award (2013-2018) from the Royal Society and the 2017 Interdisciplinary Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Lou Charkoudian is a Professor of Chemistry at Haverford College. Her research program leverages biochemical and biophysical approaches to investigate natural product biosynthesis, and how natural systems can be adapted to create molecules that better human health and the environment. Her lab has contributed to the field by developing ways to probe protein-protein and protein-substrate interactions relevant to biosynthesis at previously inaccessible spatial and temporal resolution. She has also developed bioinformatic workflows to unveil biosynthetic gene clusters that are ripe for bioprospecting new enzymes and molecules with beneficial properties. As there are no graduate students at Haverford College, this scholarly work has been conducted entirely in the context of independent undergraduate research projects and course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs).

Lou received her B.S. from Haverford College and Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry at Duke University under the mentorship of Professor Kathy Franz. She then joined Professor Chaitan Khosla’s lab at Stanford University as a postdoctoral scholar where initiated her biosynthetic investigations. Lou joined the faculty at Haverford College in 2013. Her work is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, and she is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, Cottrell Scholars Award, Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the Council for Undergraduate Research Innovative Mentor Award, and American Chemical Society Rising Star Award, amongst others. She has been elected to the Armenian Society of Fellows and currently serves on National Academy of Sciences US National Committee.

Lou is passionate about integrating original research opportunities for undergraduates into the classroom, exploring how interpersonal factors can be leveraged to build more inclusive and accessible STEM courses and training opportunities, and developing symbiotic community engagement activities.

Jon Clardy obtained a BS degree from Yale University, and a PhD from Harvard University – both in chemistry. He has held academic positions at Iowa State University, Cornell University, and most recently at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology where he is the Christopher T. Walsh Professor. His research has focused on naturally occurring biologically active small molecules, their macromolecular targets, and their roles in biology and medicine. His current interests involve the molecular underpinnings of complex symbiotic systems involving both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, with a special focus on the gut microbiome; and chemical communications, with a current focus on chemotactic sensing in octopus. 

Fumitaka Kudo completed his PhD under supervision of the late Katsumi Kakinuma at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) in 1999. After postdoctoral studies with David Cane (Brown) and Craig Townsend (Johns Hopkins), he joined Tokyo Tech in 2003 where he is currently Associate Professor of Chemistry. His lab studies biosynthesis and enzyme reaction mechanisms for microbial natural products, especially polyketides and aminoglycosides

Marnix Medema is a Professor of Bioinformatics at Wageningen University. His research group develops and applies algorithms for the (meta)genomic identification and functional prediction of microbial biosynthetic pathways, with the aim to unravel the chemical language of microbiomes. He built and co-coordinates the development of the antiSMASH software for identification of biosynthetic gene clusters and developed various additional algorithms to chart their diversity and identify their functional roles in microbiomes. Medema is recipient of NWO Rubicon, Veni and Vidi fellowships and an ERC Starting Grant, and has coordinated several international consortia studying bacterial specialized metabolites. He received several prizes for his work, including the NBIC Young Investigator Award. He is editorial board member of Natural Product Reports, mSystems and FEMS Microbes, and senior editor of ISME Communications. Also, he is member of the scientific advisory board of Hexagon Bio and co-founder of Design Pharmaceuticals. Since 2020, he also served as Van der Klaauw visiting professor of theoretical biology at Leiden University.

Anne Osbourn is a Group Leader at the John Innes Centre working on plant natural products. Her discovery that in plant genomes the genes needed to make particular natural products are often organised in clusters like ‘beads on a string’ has greatly accelerated the discovery of new pathways and chemistries.  She has established a synthetic biology platform based on transient plant expression that provides rapid access to previously inaccessible compounds and analogs at gram scale. These two step changes open up new routes to combine genomics and synthetic biology to synthesize and access previously inaccessible natural products and analogs for medicinal, agricultural and industrial applications.  Anne was awarded the Novozymes 2023 Award in recognition of her scientific contributions.  She is also a poet, and has developed and co-ordinates the Science, Art and Writing (SAW) Initiative, a cross-curricular science education outreach programme. Her prize-winning poetry collection ‘Mock Orange’ was recently published.

Eriko Takano is Professor of Synthetic Biology in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, Department of Chemistry, School of Natural Sciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering, at the University of Manchester. She is one of three directors for the EPSRC/BBSRC-funded Manchester Synthetic Biology Research Centre, SYNBIOCHEM, and a visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Japan. She has also been a World Research Hub Initiative (WRHI) Visiting Professor at the School of Life Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. 

Eriko is internationally recognized as a pioneer in the synthetic biology of microbes for antibiotic production. She has been working in both industrial and academic Streptomyces research for 38 years. She studied pharmacy at Kitasato University, School of Pharmacy, Tokyo, Japan with Prof Satoshi Omura (2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine). After working as a researcher at the R&D facility of Meiji Seika Kaisha, Yokohama, Japan for four years, she moved to the John Innes Center, Norwich, UK. She obtained her PhD on the regulation of antibiotic production in Streptomyces coelicolor from the University of East Anglia in 1994, while working at the John Innes Center, where she continued working as a postdoc until 2002. Before her arrival in Manchester, she had been she had held positions as a Rosalind Franklin Fellow, Associate Professor at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and as Assistant Professor (C1) in the Department of Microbiology / Biotechnology, University of Tübingen, Germany.

Eriko’s research interests cover many facets of microbial synthetic biology: bioinformatics software development (e.g. antiSMASH); untargeted metabolomics for chassis engineering in Streptomyces; regulatory circuit engineering through signalling molecules; microbiome and spider silk engineering; biosynthetic gene pathway assembly and engineering; and systems biology of the metabolic switch from primary to secondary metabolism in Streptomyces coelicolor, the model organism of the most important group of industrial antibiotics producers. Eriko has published 134 peer-reviewed papers and 4 book chapters and holds 4 international patents. She has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. She has served as an expert advisor for the EU, the UK and the Japanese government.