News
- Friday, 14 July 2017
- Check out this article at the coarsely named, but highly popular I F%#king Love Science by Stephen Luntz about our work, just out in Angewandte Chemie.
- Monday, 3 July 2017
- Our recent work on antimalarial herbicides was picked up by ABC who covered it on FaceBook, in an online article and in a podcast interview with Josh that starts about 9 minutes in (span is 09:20-15:21).
- Tuesday, 27 June 2017
- Congratulations to PhD student Max Corral whose manuscript "Exploiting the evolutionary relationship between malarial parasites and plants to develop new herbicides" came online at Angewandte Chemie today. This work was a close collaboration with Assoc. Prof. Keith Stubbs, an organic chemist in our School of Molecular Sciences. It can be viewed via PubMed, its DOI and this is the press release. Archived Lab News
Our research examines the genetic events that evolve new plant proteins, especially ones with pharmaceutical applications. This not only provides fundamental new knowledge about protein evolution, but also provides opportunities to engineer plants to produce these valuable molecules.
We have discovered precursor proteins and the biosynthetic routes for three very different classes of cyclic peptides, all of interest to drug designers. Combining a background in classical genetics and developmental biology with the biomedical atmosphere of our current location, we find our interests falling into three related areas of research that ask; 1) what are the genetic events that evolved drug-like peptides in plants; 2) how do plants make the peptides created by these genetic events plus how malleable are plants as a drug production system; and 3) can plants reveal the mode-of-action for drugs and enable the design of new drugs? Our goal is to convince the scientific community that plants are not just a source of drugs, but also a viable platform to produce and study them.
Plant Biology
Plant 'genetic backflips' make bioactive peptides
We have characterised the genetic origin for several different peptides of great interest to drug designers and each time we find a precursor, it seems each plant has undergone a genetic rearrangement event to make the peptides. We seek to understand why plants are going out of their way to make such bioactive peptides as well as understand how some of the genetic events came about.
Biomedical
Plants to make new drugs and understand existing drugs
Understanding the biosynthetic route for gene-encoded, bioactive peptides allows one to move these genes into other species and use them as production systems. We are currently working on two seed production systems, one via a sunflower protein and another from a gourd (pumpkin family) family of proteins. We have also started using the model plant Arabidopsis to study in-use human drugs.
Biochemistry
How plants bend, fold, cut and glue proteins into rings
We have stumbled upon an extraordinary case of protein hijack in sunflower where a protease inhibiting peptide ring is processed out of a much larger and completely unrelated protein. It is offering an opportunity to study the co-option of proteases to perform ligation reactions as well as begin to appreciate the role that chaperones play in this process both in vitro and in vivo.
