Synthetic biology, biosynthesis, enzymology, (meta)genomics, et al. Learning from Nature.

Nature is an organic chemist. The language in which we interact with Nature is chemistry, with small molecule natural products being the alphabets of this language. Natural products range from antibiotics and pharmaceuticals that we use in the clinic, to toxins and pollutants that pervade our environment. Research in the Agarwal lab seeks to understand how natural products are produced, what are the biological forces driving their syntheses in Nature, and how we can leverage this knowledge to drive scientific progress and human well‐being. We employ a combination of chemical and biochemical approaches, including but not limited to microbial genetics and metagenomics, structural and biochemical enzymology, and synthetic and analytical chemistry. Natural product biosynthesis is a treasure trove of novel enzymology. We will describe a total enzymatic reconstitution of the biosynthesis of a polybrominated marine natural product. Crystal structures of biosynthetic enzymes provide deep insights into mechanisms of key enzymatic transformations and allow for structure guided engineering of catalysts. These findings set the stage for the development of methods for mining complex metagenomic datasets to tackle the immense biological complexity of natural product sources. Support or Funding Information NIH R00ES026620 This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .