Past event
School of Chemistry Colloquium: Dr Avena Ross (Queen's University, Canada) Investigating the biosynthesis of tambjamines: bacterial alkaloid natural products
School of Chemistry colloquium open to final year project students, postgraduate masters students, PhD students, post-doctoral research associates and academic staff.
The prodiginines and tambjamines comprise a large family of microbially produced bioactive alkaloids. They are characterized by a common bipyrrole and subclassified as prodiginines when they contain a third pyrrole or tambjamines with an alkyl amine instead. Despite isolation of a sizeable number of tambjamine molecules from natural sources, only a very small number of these molecules have been correlated with a producing microbe and a biosynthetic gene cluster, thereby limiting our understanding of the biosynthesis of the tambjamine subclass. In this presentation, the genome-guided isolation of several tambjamines will be discussed alongside our work on several enzymatic steps in the later stages of prodiginine and tambjamine production.