Natural Product Antibiotics: Past, Present, Future

Professor Mohammad R. Seyedsayamdost - Department of Chemistry, Princeton University
Host: Lauren Rajakovich

Microbial natural products have served as a dominant source of antibiotics and comprise some of our most celebrated cures. Until the turn of the century, they were identified via tedious 'grind-and-find' approaches, which increasingly resulted in the re-isolation of known compounds. More recently, the availability of microbial genome sequences has ushered in a renaissance in natural product research and significantly impacted discovery approaches. In this talk, I will present new methodologies that my group has developed to locate otherwise hidden or 'cryptic' natural products, notably antibiotics, from diverse bacteria and to explore their therapeutic utility, mechanism of action, and ecological relevance. Our results provide deeper insights into microbial metabolism with implications for drug discovery and antibiotic research.