A reception with light refreshments will be held in the B10 lobby before each seminar from 1-1:30 p.m.

Abstract:
Natural products remain at the forefront of chemical biology, offering both therapeutic potential and unique chemical insights. This seminar details our group’s approach to expanding the natural product landscape: from the discovery of molecules in complex ecological niches to the elucidation of rare enzymatic mechanisms. The first portion of the talk will focus on the human oral microbiome, an underexplored reservoir of chemical diversity. I will discuss our efforts in mining for bioactive small molecules, focusing on their role in defining the "socio-chemical" landscape of oral health and disease. The second half will transition into the biosynthetic logic governing unique scaffolds and functionalities of natural products. By elucidating the enzymatic machinery involved, specifically our recent discovery and characterization of rare N-N bond-forming enzymes, we demonstrate how understanding nature's synthetic strategies enables the production of novel analogs via synthetic biology and expands the modern biocatalytic toolkit.