Friday, 15 March 2024 11:00am – 12:00pm

This seminar will be delivered in Lecture Theatre 4

Speaker: Professor Doug Mitchell

Host: Dr Constance Bailey

Title: Genomics-Enabled Discovery of New Molecules & Enzymes

Abstract: Advances in genome sequencing and bioinformatics have catalyzed a resurgence of interest in natural products. Our principal focus has been on the ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs), which, despite being comprised of 50 known structural classes, share a simplified biosynthetic logic and require a minimal genomic footprint. This talk will describe the challenges we encountered and insights we gained from large-scale RiPP genome mining. New synthetic biology approaches to accessing new molecules and discovering new enzyme chemistry will be discussed, as well as ongoing work to define the boundaries of nature’s biosynthetic capabilities.

Bio: Doug Mitchell holds the John and Margaret Witt Professorship in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an affiliate of the Department of Microbiology and a member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. Mitchell received a BS in Chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University, PhD in Chemistry from UC Berkeley (Marletta), and completed postdoctoral work at UC San Diego (Dixon). Mitchell joined the Univ. of Illinois faculty in 2009 with promotion to Associate Professor in 2015 and Professor in 2018. In 2019, Mitchell co-founded Lassogen, Inc. (San Diego) which is developing lasso peptides as a new modality for treating cancer. Mitchell’s research centers on the chemical biology of natural product biosynthesis and derives insights from big data genomics, mechanistic enzymology, and synthetic biology. The Mitchell group currently consists of 15 PhD students, 3 postdocs, and 2 undergraduate researchers. The lab is funded by multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health and collaborative agreements with several companies.
https://mitchell-lab.chemistry.illinois.edu
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=arWBqN8AAAAJ&hl=en