29th Annual Stauffer Lectureship (Day 2 of 2): Professor Wilfred van der Donk, UIUC
About the Seminar
Biosynthesis and Engineering of Macrocyclic Peptides
Ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) constitute a very large class of peptide natural products. Lanthionine-containing peptides are examples of this rapidly growing class. These peptides are post-translationally modified to install multiple thioether crosslinks. During their biosynthesis, a single enzyme typically breaks 8-16 chemical bonds and forms 6-10 new bonds with high control over site- and chemoselectivity. This presentation will discuss utilization of these biocatalysts for bioengineering purposes and generation and use of macrocyclic peptide libraries. The lecture will also present mechanistic insights into the remarkable biocatalysts that transform a linear peptide into polycyclic products.
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).