Abstract 1019 Discovery of New Structures, Enzymes and Functions from Fungal Biosynthetic Pathways

Nature performs challenging synthetic transformations using powerful enzymes. These enzymes are frequently found in the biosynthetic pathways of natural products, many of which have served as inspirations for generations of synthetic chemists over the last fifty years. With recent advances in our abilities to manipulate the biosynthetic pathways, many powerful enzymes in novel natural product biosynthetic pathways have been revealed and characterized. In this talk, I will present a selection of recent work in the identification, characterization and engineering of structurally interesting new natural products and functionally diverse enzymes. I will present the use of different genome mining approaches to identify novel natural product scaffolds and biological activities, including these classified as unknown (BGCs)-unknowns (structures). Our work demonstrates there is significant potential in discovering new natural products from fungi. This work is supported by NIGMS R35GM118056.