Understanding and Engineering a Natural Herbicide from Cyanobacteria

Bacteria have an incredible capacity to produce natural products with exquisite bioactivities, which makes these compounds excellent candidates as medicines and agrochemicals. Cyanobacteria are an important source of natural products, although only a limited number are currently used in agriculture or medicine. This project aims to understand and engineer the production of herbicidal molecules from cyanobacteria. To achieve this goal, this project will involve molecular biology, gene expression, natural products chemistry and cyanobacterial microbiology.