Examining what happens to fungicides once they're inside plants by mass spectrometry.
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Discovery of herbicides with new modes of action, new chemistries inspired by antimalarial drugs.
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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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We're seeking a PhD candidate (ideally a chemical biologist or organic chemically-minded person) to use our OrbiTrap Exploris 120 mass spectrometer to study fungicide dynamics inside plants, see Tweet, or LinkedIn for full details.
Josh is back from doing harvest at the Della Bosca's farm near Southern Cross. To find out what he got up to during his time out east, take a look at the photo-laden Twitter daily diary entries with the hashtags #harvest #MarvelLoch.
Out today in Nature Communications is our paper on statins, their target HMG-CoA reductase and its potential as a herbicide target. See the article via its DOI, PubMed, this Tweet and we wrote a Behind the Paper article.
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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