Research
Research Focus
The Manley Lab is interested in the enzymology underlying the biosynthesis of natural products. The goal of our lab is to use genome mining to uncover new biosynthetic gene clusters containing metalloenzymes and to reveal the natural products that they produce.
Natural Products
Natural products, or secondary metabolites, are compounds produced by living organisms that often confer an evolutionary advantage to the producing organism. Such compounds exhibit unusual chemical structures that confer their potent bioactivities, including antimicrobial activity, nutrient sequestration, signaling, and more.
Bioinorganic Chemistry
To achieve the complex and challenging chemical transformations in natural product chemistry, nature often employs metal ions as enzymatic cofactors, which are capable of leveraging the oxidizing power of molecular oxygen as a cosubstrate to catalyze such reactions. Bacterial genomes encode numerous uncharacterized metalloenzymes, representing untapped chemical diversity in nature.
