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Natural product biosynthesis

Plants produce a vast diversity of chemicals (natural products) that have many varied biological activities and are essential to our daily lives.

Our research is unravelling the genetics and biochemistry behind the biosynthesis of many types of natural products and focusing on the development of platforms for the production of compounds of pharmaceutical and industrial importance.

Our projects

We aim to understand how Daphniphyllum macropodum makes its complex alkaloids and explore their potential for therapeutics.
We are looking to express, engineer and apply C-C bond forming enzymes from plants to the synthesis of valuable chemical intermediates.
We are using genetic technology for the development and use of valuable co-products from rapeseed.
We are seeking to understand exactly how a mint has evolved into catmint: how did Nepeta evolve to make this unique compound?
Discovering biosynthetic pathways for medicinal diterpenoids from Euphorbiaceae family. The Euphorbiaceae family of flowering plants produce a diverse range of casbene-derived diterpenoids exhibiting diverse biological activities.
We have several opportunities to further your study.
We work closely with a broad range of partners to tackle the challenges of the 21st Century.