Discovery of herbicides with new modes of action, new chemistries inspired by antimalarial drugs.
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Examining what happens to fungicides once they're inside plants by mass spectrometry.
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Protein crystallography of new and known herbicide targets to enable ab initio herbicide design.
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Origins of diverse (often cyclic) plant peptides and the enzymology of their synthesis.
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Out today is structural work led by Joel Haywood that examines the first crystal structures of plant HMGR, the target of cholesterol medication, and how it can be expoited to give statins plant-specificity. Check out the preprint via the DOI or this Tweet.
Our first foray into machine learning led by Douglas Pires and David Ascher came out today in Briefings in Bioinformatics entitled "cropCSM: designing safe and potent herbicides with graph-based signatures". See this Tweet to read more and access it.
Early online at Plant Communications is our crystal structure paper on the target of asulam, jointly first-authored by Grishma Vadlamani & Kirill Sukhoverkov. See what we learned from the first plant crystal structure for HPPK/DHPS via its DOI or this Tweet!
Our research has two separate foci on two classes of agrochemical; we work to find truly new herbicides and have started to pursue the in planta behaviour of fungicides. Our herbicide research aims to find new herbicides, principally by directing our first efforts at finding and validating new modes of action. Our fungicide work is new since arriving at CCDM in 2021 and seeks to understand biotransformation led by mass spectrometry. We also continue to publish what is quickly becoming legacy work on peptide biosynthesis, protease-mediated cyclisation and the genetic events that evolve new plant proteins.
Our applied herbicide work started with our finding that, thanks to the established close evolutionary relationship between plants and the malarial parasites, many antimalarial drugs are also herbicidal. After trawling antimalarial drug libraries for novel herbicide chemistries, we have turned our focus to discovering novel modes of herbicide action. Our fungicide biotransformation work was inspired by colleagues at CCDM who seek to understand the basis for resistance by pathogens and investigate various means to improve crop health.
Check out the active projects in the lab, check out Josh's Twitter feed, see what the lab is publishing or get real and visit us in person! We're always looking for bright minds to join us, get in touch by e-mail!
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