Hey everyone! I don’t know about all of you, but I know that I personally am starting to try to narrow down what kind of programs I want to apply to after Wellesley–do I want to stick with biochemistry, or do I want to lean a little more toward biology, or maybe toward chemistry? Well, a speaker in my microbiology course this week gave a talk about microbial interactions, and she happened to mention a chemist that I decided I really wanted to look into, and I thought maybe people in this class would like to read up on him too! His name is Michael Fishbacher from UCSF, and from his website, http://www.fischbachgroup.org/research, he describes his research goals as follows:
1. Natural products are produced by the human microbiota.
Most known natural products come from exotic soil and marine bacteria. We have recently found that bacteria from a surprisingly underexplored niche — the human body — are prolific producers of natural products. We are currently mining gut- and skin-associated bacteria for natural products that play important roles in human physiology and disease.
2. Natural products mediate microbe-host and microbe-microbe interactions.
We are particularly interested in the mechanisms by which natural products from the human microbiome mediate interspecies interactions. We are focusing on interactions between gut bacteria and humans that are relevant to human diseases like Crohn’s disease and obesity, and on interactions between different species of skin bacteria that likely play a role in susceptibility to infection by bacterial pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus.
3. Connecting natural products to the genes that encode them accelerates discovery.
We are developing a bioinformatic algorithm that automatically identifies clusters of small-molecule-producing genes in bacterial genomes. An early version of this algorithm has already identified thousands of new gene clusters in the thousands of bacterial genomes sequenced to date, many of them in species from the human microbiome. We are refining this algorithm so it can predict the chemical structure of the small molecule encoded by each gene cluster. In the near future, we believe this tool will provide us the first global view of the small molecules produced by bacteria, which will serve as a powerful predictive tool for our experimental efforts.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find this research really interesting!