Bertram Dillon Steele Lecture

Prof Spencer Williams (University of Melbourne) will be presenting the 2024 Bertram Dillon Steele lecture. In his 'The Secret Chemistry and Biology of the Sulfur Cycle' lecture he will describe the discovery of specialised glycosidases termed sulfoquinovosidases that release SQ from sulfolipids, a new pathway for SQ degradation that achieves the cleavage of the distinctive carbon-sulfur bond, and the development of synthetic tools that can be used to study and exploit the new enzymes and proteins that we have discovered.

Associate Professor Cryle from the Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University will report the recent discoveries of his group that provide fundamental insights into non-ribosomal peptide synthesis (NRPS). This includes understanding the mechanism and selectivity of key peptide synthesis and amino acid selection domains, which are common to all NRPS assembly lines and central to their function. He will also detail our efforts to reconstitute enzymatic crosslinking during glycopeptide antibiotic maturation, which is a highly challenging chemical transformation that limits our ability to produce new members of this important class of clinical antibiotics through chemical synthesis. Throughout this presentation, he will further discuss the importance of integrating chemical synthesis into engineering strategies for these complex biosynthetic pathways.

Presenter: Dr Richard Mackman, Vice President of Medicinal Chemistry, Gilead Sciences

Presenter: Professor Justin Gooding, University of New South Wales

Presenter: Professor Dean Tantillo, The University of California (Davis), USA

Presenter: Professor Mike Green, Penn State University, Pennsylvania, USA

Presenter: Professor Vanderlan Bolzani, Universidade Estaduai Paulista (UNESP), Brazil

Presenter: Professor Virgil Percec, P. Roy Vagelos Professor of Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania

Presenter: Professor Andrew B Holmes AM FRS FAA, CSIRO Division of Materials Science and Engineering; University of Melbourne School of Chemistry, Bio21 Institute ; Imperial College Department of Chemistry

Presenter: Professor Peter H. Seeberger, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces

Presenter: Prof Chris Abell, Professor of Biological Chemistry, the University of Cambridge

Presenter: Prof Dale Poulter, John A. Widstoe Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, University of Utah

Presenter: Prof Leo Radom, ARC Professorial Fellow, School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney

Presenter: Prof Cameron Kepert, ARC Federation Fellow, School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney

Presenter: Prof Craig J Hawker, Director of the Materials Research Laboratory, University of California, Santa Barbara

Presenter: Assoc Prof Margaret Harding, School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney

Presenter: Prof Ronald J Quinn, Director of Natural Product Discovery, Griffith University