Yeast Natural Products
We make molecules. We learn chemistry from nature and use these lessons to make sustainable chemicals.
What we try to achieve and why it is important
For about 150 years industrial chemistry has revolved around petroleum. Our transportation, food, and health are dangerously linked to this non-renewable resource that will be depleted in about 50 years. The world urgently needs new chemical processes that can support us sustainably.
Fungi are extraordinary chemists; they make molecules for competition, attack, defense, communication, deception, energy-storage, and structure-building. We study fungal chemistry to learn how to use it to make polymers, drugs, agrochemicals, fuels for aviation, rocketry, and shipping,
How we achieve our aims – methods, tools, technologies
Our work involves collecting and cultivating fungi, we look at the chemicals they produce, and decode the chemical recipes stored in their DNA. We then transfer these recipes to simpler, laboratory-friendly fungi who can then make the chemicals. We modify the recipes to create variants of the natural chemicals, iterating this process until we get molecules suitable for human needs.
How our research can be used
We are learning a lot of fungal chemistry, and we are making more and more new molecules, drugs, fuels, and polymers. Our hope is that some of these molecules, recipes and methods may contribute to a new era of industrial chemistry that can sustain human life on the planet for a long time.
Contact
Jay Keasling Scientific Director JDKeasling@lbl.gov
Pablo Cruz-Morales Senior Researcher pcruzm@biosustain.dtu.dk