The O'Connor lab studies the biochemical steps that comprise the biosynthetic pathway of secondary metabolites to understand the mechanism, function and evolution of biosynthetic enzymes with the long-term goal of generating new natural products.

Natural Product Biosynthesis

Understanding the enzymes that catalyze natural product synthesis may enable production of these important compounds in more tractable host organisms and may also facilitate reprogramming of biosynthetic pathways to produce "unnatural" natural products with improved pharmacological activities.

We explore the enzyme based biosynthetic pathways that generate structurally complex and clinically useful natural products. Our goals are to understand the mechanism of the individual enzymes, understand how the enzymes interact with one another and to modulate the substrate specificity of the enzymes. We take a multi-disciplinary approach to address these questions: protein expression, molecular biology, enzymology, high throughput assay design, natural product isolation and structure elucidation and chemical synthesis are key components of our research. For more information, please see the O'Connor group homepage.