Mohammad (Mo) Seyedsayamdost, of Princeton University, will deliver a seminar entitled, "Unveiling the dark matter of microbial metabolomes." 

Abstract:
Microbial natural products serve as a dominant source of pharmaceutical
compounds and comprise some of our most celebrated cures. Recent studies,
however, have been plagued by the frequent rediscovery of old molecules. The
underlying reason is that the vast majority of natural product biosynthetic
genes in a given bacterium are not significantly expressed, when cultured
under standard laboratory conditions. These so-called ‘silent’ or ‘cryptic’
gene clusters represent a large reservoir of bioactive molecules and methods
that access them would have a profound impact on natural products research
and thereby on drug discovery. In this talk, I will present new strategies
that my group has developed for activating silent biosynthetic gene
clusters. Application of these approaches to diverse bacteria has unveiled
not only the products of silent gene clusters, but also small molecule
elicitors, which in most cases are growth-inhibitory or antibiotic in
nature. These findings have led to the idea that old antibiotics may be used
to find new ones. In combination with emerging profiling methodologies, our
efforts are beginning to reveal the 'hidden' metabolites encoded in
microbial genomes.