Department of Medicinal Chemistry: Roland Kersten, Ph.D.

Department of Medicinal Chemistry: Roland Kersten, Ph.D. 

Department: Medicinal Chemistry

Speaker: Roland Kersten, Ph.D. , University of Michigan

Title: Omics-guided discovery and biosynthesis of plant peptides

Abstract: Plants biosynthesize peptide natural products via the ribosomal pathway. Plant peptides are cyclized via head-to-tail-macrocyclization, disulfide bonds or crosslinks between aromatic amino acid side chains and other amino acids. The latter aromatic side-chain-derived macrocycles were recently connected to a copper-dependent plant protein family called the BURP-domain (named after founding members BNM2, USPL, RD22 and PG1β) and, therefore, these ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) are termed burpitides.

Several characterized burpitide cyclases encode their substrate within the same polypeptide as the catalytic domain, which enables gene-guided discovery of burpitides from plant genomes and transcriptomes. In addition, large-scale plant metabolomics can be combined with sequencing-based approaches for burpitide discovery. Here, I present omics-guided discovery of burpitides and the elucidation of their underlying biosynthetic pathways across the plant kingdom.