Chemical Biology

In addition to their roles as lead compounds for drug discovery small molecules can also play a valuable role in chemical biology as probes for investigating complex biological processes. While synthetic libraries have shown some success in this regard, natural products remain one of the most important sources of potent and selective chemical probes.

By employing a program of chemical derivatization for lead natural products with an array of chemical tags we are developing a general strategy for the investigation of biological targets. The interface of fluorescence site localization with protein pulldown experiments to identify candidate protein tagets provides a broad base of biological data from which more detailed target identification studies can be developed.

Using either forward or reverse chemical genetic approaches we can probe the function of individual proteins of interest, or determine the target parthways of compounds that display specific phenotypic responses. This flexibility provides many opportunities in the relm of chemical genetics which we aim to apply to target systems including malaria, African sleeping sickness, biofilm formation and cancer cell cytotoxicity.