Fired Up About Fungi

摘要

As a young child, while living in Southampton, I remember filling an air-raid shelter in a friend's garden half an inch deep with methylated spirits and setting fire to it [Ed: we don't recommend you try this!]. This was definitely an experiment, but more designed to see whether the friend's mother would notice, or not. She didn't!rnBeing in the right place at the right time. It was David O'Hagan who attracted me towards biological chemistry. I started a PhD with him combining synthesis and fungal biology and was hooked from then. I have always been grateful to have studied chemistry - the ability to synthesise and analyse compounds has underpinned all the advances in my area of research, but the questions of biology remain the biggest.rnOur biggest project is investigating programming in fungal iterative polyketide synthases. These enzyme systems are responsible for the biosynthesis of a huge range of biologically active compounds. The enzymes responsible are true nano-machines that are programmed to perform a choreographed sequence of reactions. We can change the reactions - but not yet rationally. We are applying molecular genetics, enzymology and synthetic chemistry to investigate this problem. At the moment we are attempting to shuffle genes encoding proteins with closely related programmes in order to dissect the programmes and discover which parts of the proteins are involved.