William Wuest
Emory University, GA·Chemistry
Microbes compete by making chemicals that block their rivals, especially in crowded places such as the rhizosphere, the soil around plant roots. These natural products are promising starting points for new antimicrobial compounds.
- Fields
Chemistry
Microbiology & Immunology
Plant Science & Agriculture
- Topics
natural products
total synthesis
organic synthesis
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2031
What they work on
- Synthesize inhibitors inspired by the natural product peniciaculin, which likely mimic the cofactor ubiquinone, and test them against blight-causing plant pathogens using organic synthesis and microbiology.
- Make and evaluate 4-hydroxypyridinone natural products from the rhizosphere to identify the key interactions with their targets, guiding the design of next-generation antifungal agrochemicals with industry partners.
- Use diverted total synthesis to build natural products from plants, fungi and rhizosphere bacteria that selectively kill Gram-positive or Gram-negative bacteria, along with analogs, and use genetics and proteomics to uncover their mechanisms.
- Identify the chemical features that let natural products block bacterial biofilms, and design simpler analogs with improved properties, testing them with transcriptomics and microbiological assays.
More about the research
They are needed because crop pathogens and disease-causing bacteria keep evolving resistance to current treatments. The lab makes these natural products, and variations of them, by organic synthesis. It then tests them in biological assays to learn how they work and to design improved versions. One project targets plant pathogens and the other targets bacteria that cause human disease.
Why it matters
Farmers lose large amounts of crops to blight-causing bacteria and fungi that evolve resistance to current treatments. Natural product-inspired ubiquinone mimics could lead to new antifungal agrochemicals. In medicine, narrow-spectrum antibacterials and biofilm inhibitors could become therapeutic leads or research tools against pathogenic bacteria. Biofilm inhibitors are especially relevant to drug resistance and implant-associated problems.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Joshua Pierce
North Carolina State University, NC·Chemistry
Develop scalable, short synthetic routes to antimicrobial natural product families including polycyclic guanidines, oxazolidinones, curvulamines and abyssomicins, producing enough material for biological testing.
Zhaomin Yang
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Microbiology & Immunology
Improve the potency and selectivity of a novel small-molecule inhibitor of the bacterial type IV pilus through structure–activity relationship studies that systematically vary its chemical structure.
Alessandra Eustaquio
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Identify how epigenetic DNA methylation drives 580-fold overproduction of the peptide capistruin in an industrial Burkholderia strain, by perturbing enzymes of its restriction-modification system.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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