Biosynthesis of unusual functionalities in natural products Wenjun Zhang UC Berkeley, USA Natural products are important small molecules for studying, treating, and even causing human diseases, and they typically have unique functional groups that are critical for their biological activities. By exploiting the biosynthetic machinery by which these functionalities are synthesized, it is possible to enhance, vary or diminish the biological activities of parent compounds and apply the biosynthetic machinery to new systems for functional group installation. Toward this goal, the chemical logic and enzymatic machinery underlying natural product biosynthesis need to be fully characterized and understood. Zhang lab has recently revealed new enzymatic machinery for synthesizing many unique pharmacophores and molecular scaffolds of natural products, including but not limited to terminal alkene and alkyne, isonitrile, N -hydroxytriazene, epoxyquinone, epoxyketone, cyclohexanecarboxyl-CoA, indolizidine, pyrroloindole and antimycin-type depsipeptides. This talk will highlight a few examples.
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