Associate Professor Michael Freeman

This lab's work focuses on the discovery and heterologous expression of pathways and genes involved in the biosynthesis of metabolites from unique microbial sources. The researchers use cutting-edge and classical techniques in biochemistry, microbiology, metagenomics, and mass spectrometry to investigate unconventional peptide-based metabolites and pathways invoking radical-mediated chemistry. The major project in the lab focuses on a new family of peptide metabolites encoded in a wide range of fungal and bacterial genomes. MSI resources crucial to this project's success include computing power and software for de novo peptide identification from LC-MS data. Additionally, the researchers require resources for the data management, processing, and analysis of large sets of sequenced microbial/fungal genomes and transcriptomes for the genome mining of putative biosynthetic gene clusters as well as the assembly and annotation of newly sequenced genomes. Overall, this research aims to tackle the exponentially expanding genomic universe for the discovery of new enzymology and therapeutics.