Student Hosted Colloquia Seminar: Professor Ian Seiple, UCSF

About the Seminar

Chemical synthesis to unlock natural product potential

Many organisms in nature produce secondary metabolites (natural products) that help them survive and thrive in their environment. These molecules have been optimized over millions of years to have useful functions: they kill bacteria, poison predators, attract mates or symbionts, or even reduce the perception of pain. However, since most natural products did not evolve in humans, they often have liabilities that limit their utilities as drugs such as toxicity, instability, and poor pharmacology. Our lab uses chemical synthesis to modify promising natural scaffolds to overcome such limitations. In this talk I will discuss this approach as applied to molecules that target one of nature’s most beautiful machines: the ribosome.

About the Speaker

Ian B. Seiple received his B.S. from the University of California at Berkeley under the tutelage of Prof. Dirk Trauner and conducted his doctoral research in the laboratory of Prof. Phil S. Baran at The Scripps Research Institute. During his graduate studies he synthesized antitumor and antibiotic marine alkaloids. He conducted postdoctoral studies with Andy Myers at Harvard University, where he developed fully synthetic routes to macrolide antibiotics. He started at University of California, San Francisco in 2015, where his lab uses chemical synthesis to address challenges in biology and medicine.

Host: Cara Starnbach