Natural product discovery and biosynthesis.
Microorganisms play an important role in our everyday lives and provide essential functions such as recycling of living material, nitrogen fixation, and symbiotic colonization with animals. The ability of microorganisms to live in a wide variety of environments has led to the evolution of countless secondary metabolites, or natural products, required for their survival. These metabolites have long been utilized for many different applications from food preservatives and flavoring agents to biofuels. More notably, natural products commonly have bioactive properties which can be exploited as pharmaceutical products like antibiotics and antitumor agents.
The Higgins lab uses specialized genome mining approaches to identify novel glycosylated natural products produced by uncharacterized gene clusters to discover new molecules and biosynthetic enzymes. We also investigate how natural products are made by determining the structure-function relationships of the individual biosynthetic enzymes. This will lay the groundwork for protein- and bio-engineering approaches for diversification of natural products to improve and/or broaden their therapeutic potential and for clinical development strategies. This project is funded by NIH 1R35GM151137-01.