Our first publication as "The Caesar lab" is officially published!! Ashley Clements and Lexie Lee were authors on our new publication "Bioactivity-driven fungal metabologenomics identifies antiproliferative stemphone analogs and their biosynthetic gene cluster," which was published in the journal Metabolomics early this August!
This was a major collaborative effort involving laboratories from Northwestern University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Newcastle University (in addition to JMU, of course).
As I talked about in a previous post, one of my major research foci while I was at Northwestern was combining genomic fingerprints of fungi with their metabolomic profiles, allowing us to link their biosynthetic pathways that synthesize natural products to the natural products themselves. This "metabologenomics" process has shown success for linking metabolites to their biosynthetic machinery, but it only allows inferences about the bioactivity of the detected metabolites. During my PhD, I used a process called "biochemometrics" which allows us to predict which compounds in a complex mixture are responsible for bioactivity. In this paper, we combine chemical information, antiproliferative bioactivity data, and genome sequences to prioritize the discovery of bioactive secondary metabolites and their BGCs in a bioactivity-directed metabologenomics workflow. As a proof-of-concept, we characterized three new stemphone analogs with antiproliferative activity against human melanoma and ovarian cancer cell lines. We propose a rational biosynthesis for these compounds (thanks in part to Ashley and Lexie's work on this project), highlighting the potential of using biological activity as a filter to prioritize bioactive molecules from complex metabologenomics datasets.
After years of hard work and a multi-institutional collaboration of close to 20 authors, we have finally published our findings!
A big congratulations to Ashley and Lexie for officially being published scientific authors!!
Read more here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11296971/
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