Natural Product Leads to Selective Fungicides and Herbicides

The maleidrides are a fascinating and diverse group of secondary metabolites produced exclusively by filamentous fungi. Known individually as heptadrides, octadrides or nonadrides, depending on the size of the central carbon ring, as a group they exhibit a wide range of bioactivies including herbicidal and fungicidal activities. Our research into various maleidrides has laid an excellent foundation for the proposed work. The generation of draft genomes, and subsequent genome mining has led to the identification of gene clusters (Szwalbe et al., Chem. Comm., 2015, 51, 17088) and comparative bioinformatics found that all maleidride gene clusters investigated contain a core set of genes. This work has led to the proposal of a universal pathway for the biosynthesis of maleidrides (Williams et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2016, 55, 6784).
The overall aim of this studentship is to use a multidisciplinary approach to deepen our understanding and utility of the maleidrides. Approaches will involve further genome mining to increase our genetic resources for this class of compounds, heterologous expression to increase yields and generate novel compounds via combinatorial biosynthesis, and synthetic chemistry, both to investigate the natural products and generate novel compounds for bioactivity testing.