Chemistry Seminar - Strategies to Generate Peptide Natural Products through Synthetic Biology

Title: Strategies to Generate Peptide Natural Products through Synthetic Biology

Speaker: Dr Constance Bailey, from The School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney

Abstract: Many of the most interesting, complex therapeutic natural products are peptides. Peptide natural products are biosynthesized by two distinct routes. One is, like proteins, via the ribosome followed by posttranslational modification. The class of peptide natural products are termed RiPPS. The second route is by large 'megasynthetase' enzymes that select individual amino acids, called nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs). Research from my laboratory focuses on new strategies to generate peptide natural products via bioengineering the biosynthetic pathways. These peptides have therapeutic properties such as combatting antibiotic resistance. We use a variety of approaches to explore the biosynthesis of these compounds including cell free protein expression, mechanistic enzymology, and heterologous expression with the goal of generating peptides that are too complex to create by synthetic organic chemistry. More recently, efforts have focused on investigating novel topologically complex peptides isolated from the Australian environment. Taken together, our work employs a broad, interdisciplinary approach toward harnessing the power of biology to generate complex metabolites.

Bio: Dr Constance Bailey is a Senior Lecturer and group leader in the School of Chemistry at the University of Sydney. She completed her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin investigating the enzymology and biocatalytic applications of polyketide syntheases and pursued a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley, Larence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Joint BioEnergy Institute where she investigated bioengineering and synthetic biology applications of polyketide synthases. Prior to starting at the University of Sydney she was an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. In June 2023, she moved her group to the University of Sydney where she investigates applying synthetic biology to generate a broad range of microbial natural products.