29th Annual Stauffer Lectureship (Day 1 of 2): Professor Wilfred van der Donk, UIUC
About the Seminar
Genome Mining for New Chemistry
The genome sequencing efforts of the past 20 years have revealed that ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) constitute a large class of peptide natural products. These molecules are produced in all three domains of life, their biosynthetic genes are ubiquitous in the currently sequenced genomes, and their structural diversity is vast. Furthermore, they are increasingly recognized for their involvement in fighting or causing human disease. This presentation will discuss the use of genome mining and synthetic biology for the discovery of new RiPPs that has also proven to be an excellent platform to discover unusual chemistry involved in their biosynthesis.1-3
- Nguyen, D. T.; Mitchell, D. A.; van der Donk, W. A. Genome mining for new enzyme chemistry. ACS Catal. 2024, 14, 4536-53.
- Nguyen, D. T.; Zhu, L.; Gray, D. L.; Woods, T. J.; Padhi, C.; Flatt, K. M.; Mitchell, D. A.; van der Donk, W. A. Biosynthesis of macrocyclic peptides with C-terminal β-amino-α-keto acid groups by three different metalloenzymes. ACS Cent. Sci. 2024, 10, 1022-32.
- Yu, Y.; van der Donk, W. A. PEARL-catalyzed peptide bond formation after chain reversal by ureido-forming condensation domains. ACS Cent. Sci. 2024, 10, 1242-50.
About the Speaker
Wilfred van der Donk was born in the Netherlands and received his B.S. and M.S. from Leiden University, working with Jan Reedijk. He moved to the USA in 1989 to pursue his Ph.D. in Chemistry at Rice University with Kevin Burgess. After postdoctoral work at MIT with JoAnne Stubbe, he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997, where he holds the Richard E. Heckert Chair in Chemistry. Since 2008, he has been an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Research in his laboratory uses chemistry, enzymology, and molecular biology to better understand enzyme catalysis and to use that knowledge for synthetic biology. He has co-authored more than 350 publications and is a recipient of an ACS Cope Scholar Award (2006), the Jeremy Knowles Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2010), the Emil Thomas Kaiser Award of the Protein Society (2013), the Vincent du Vigneaud Award of the American Peptide Society (2017), and the Alfred Bader Award in Bioinorganic or Bioorganic Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (2025). He is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences (USA). He has served on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation, the Searle Scholars Advisory Board, the Advisory Council of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowships Committee in Chemistry, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research (Germany).