DWIS Seminar: Professor Alison Narayan, University of Michigan
About the Seminar
"Biocatalytic strategies for building molecules"
Small molecules have an outsized influence on human health as therapeutics, chemical probes, and tools for exploring biology. Yet, the full potential of these molecules is often limited by challenges in their chemical synthesis. Modern synthetic chemistry continues to advance the control of chemo-, site-, and stereoselectivity, but new strategies are still needed to make complex targets more accessible and efficient to prepare.
Biocatalysis offers a powerful solution, providing catalysts that achieve remarkable selectivity and efficiency under mild conditions. Nature’s own biosynthetic pathways, responsible for intricate metabolites such as taxol and vancomycin, illustrate this potential. Likewise, the increasing use of enzymes in industrial synthesis demonstrates the value of biocatalytic approaches. However, broader adoption in academic and industrial laboratories remains limited by the narrow range of well-characterized reactions, uncertainty in enzyme substrate scope, and challenges in integrating biocatalysis into multistep synthetic routes.
To overcome these barriers, my group employs high-throughput strategies to map sequence–function relationships and discover new enzymatic activities. In this talk, I will discuss: (1) the development of biocatalytic C–C bond-forming and C–H functionalization reactions; (2) ancestral sequence reconstruction as a strategy for building diverse and evolvable enzyme libraries; and (3) emerging platforms that aim to make biocatalysis more accessible and impactful for the broader organic chemistry community.
About the Speaker
Alison Narayan's main research interest is identifying enzymes from secondary metabolite pathways with potential synthetic utility and developing methods based on these biocatalysts to enable access to biologically active target molecules.
Narayan holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. She completed her undergraduate studies in chemistry at the University of Michigan, where she later returned as a postdoctoral research fellow in the lab of LSI faculty member David Sherman.
She joined the Life Sciences Institute faculty as an assistant professor in 2015.