Research is conducted at the interface of chemistry and biology.
We are interested in studying the biosynthesis of microbial natural products at the chemical, biochemical and genetic levels. Several projects are currently in progress with marine microbial metabolites involving polyketide, peptide and terpenoid biosynthetic pathways. Our research efforts involve detailed analysis of biosynthetic mechanisms and engineering structural analogs through combinatorial biosynthesis. We aim to clone natural product biosynthesis gene clusters from uncultivatable symbionts and heterologously express them in surrogate hosts for the generation of renewable supplies of the drug candidate.