Seminar by Dr. Shanteri Singh, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Oklahoma, USA on "Using natural product biosynthetic enzymes for drug discovery"
16 Dec 2019
Seminar Room #350
Talk Title : " "Using natural product biosynthetic enzymes for drug discovery""
Abstract
Dr. Singh is interested in the structural diversification of natural products todevelopdrug candidates with biological activity against cancer and infectious diseases. Her research focuses on rationally engineeringenzymesto modifysubstrate acceptability profiles and develop novel drugs with improved function.Natural products and their derivatives account for about three-quarters of the approved drugs on the market. Using conventional chemical synthesis to structurally diversify complex natural products can be challenging.To overcome this challenge, the Singh Laboratory engineers enzymes for proficiency, promiscuity, or altered substrate specificity,capable of performingregio-and stereo-specifictransformations in order to generate a library of new drug like molecules for screening. Recently, she has developed a platform for drug discovery through engineering the substrate specificity of prenyltransferases, a class of natural productlate stage modification enzyme. In this seminar, she will discuss the development of this prenyltransferase chemoenzymatic platform to diversify natural products with a library of novel substrates in order to generatetherapeutically relevantmoleculeswith enhanced activity againstantimicrobial resistant bacterial strains.Dr. Singh obtainedher PhD fromthe Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, and subsequently pursued post-doctoral research at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the United States,and Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Dr. Singh is growing her laboratory and has expertise in natural product biosynthesis, structural biology, and biochemistry.