Sarah O'Connor

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Sarah E. O'Connor is an American natural product chemist . She investigates the multitude of metabolic products in plants, which are often of medicinal interest as medicinal substances, such as alkaloids and iridoids . Her research focuses on the question of how plants produce these complex compounds from simple building blocks, and how the metabolic pathways have developed over time. Since 2011 she has been project manager at the John Innes Center in Norwich , Great Britain. In November 2018 she was appointed Scientific Member by the Max Planck Society . She heads the Natural Product Biosynthesis department at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena .

education

Sarah O'Connor studied at the University of Chicago from 1991 to 1995 ; She completed her studies with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry . She then did her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge under Barbara Imperiali on the subject of Conformational Effects of Asparagine-Linked Glycosylation . She received her PhD for her research on protein glycosylation . She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and returned to MIT as a professor from 2003 to 2010.

research

Sarah O'Connor's scientific work includes detailed studies of important medicinal plants: Rauwolfia serpentina , Catharanthus roseus , and Aspergillus japonicus . Using bioinformatics and enzyme characterization, her working group reveals which biosynthetic pathways these plants use to produce active substances. The incorporation of new enzymes such as a halogenase or an oxidase creates new variants of these molecules that do not occur in nature. The aim of the research is to produce “novel compounds” with even better properties, such as reduced side effects.

Awards and memberships

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Website of the O'Connor Group .
  2. ↑ Sarah O'Connor becomes the new director of our institute .
  3. ^ Sarah E. O'Connor. MIT, accessed January 24, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Weslee S. Glenn, Ezekiel Nims, Sarah E. O'Connor: Reengineering a Tryptophan Halogenase To Preferentially Chlorinate a Direct Alkaloid Precursor . In: Journal of the American Chemical Society . 133, No. 48, December 7, 2011, ISSN  0002-7863 , pp. 19346-19349. doi : 10.1021 / ja2089348 . PMID 22050348 .
  5. ↑ Lorenzo Caputi, Jakob Franke, Scott C. Farrow, Khoa Chung, Richard ME Payne, Trinh-Don Nguyen, Thu-Thuy T. Dang, Inês Soares Teto Carqueijeiro, Konstantinos Koudounas: Missing enzymes in the biosynthesis of the anticancer drug vinblastine in Madagascar periwinkle . In: Science . 360, No. 6394, May 3, 2018, ISSN  0036-8075 , pp. 1235-1239. doi : 10.1126 / science.aat4100 . PMID 29724909 .
  6. ↑ Creative Sponge: Sarah O'Connor elected into EMBO | John Innes Center ( s )
  7. ^ Wain medal lecture - School of Biosciences - University of Kent .
personal data
SURNAME O'Connor, Sarah
ALTERNATIVE NAMES O'Connor, Sarah E.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American natural product chemist
DATE OF BIRTH 20th century