Duration
24 Aug 2012 - 02 Sep 2012
Lecture topics (L1-13)
L1 Julian Davies – The origin and evolution of antibiotics
L2 Flavia Marinelli – Isolation, screening and cultivation of natural product producers
L3 Gerry Wright – Practical natural product purification and characterisation
L4 Greg Challis/Govind Chandra/Mervyn Bibb – Introduction to the computer workshops
L5 Joern Piel – Dissection and manipulation of natural product biosynthesis
L6 Roberto Kolter – Chemical ecology of inter-species interactions (1)
L7 Roberto Kolter – Chemical ecology of inter-species interactions (2)
L8 Mervyn Bibb/Maureen Bibb – Regulation of secondary metabolism and its analysis
L9 Gerry Wright – Using resistance to enrich for antibiotic producers
L10 Duška Vujaklija – New insights into bacterial phosphoproteome analysis
L11 Flavia Marinelli – Industrial fermentation and strain improvement
L12 Joern Piel – Natural products from uncultured bacteria
L13 Mervyn Bibb/Greg Challis – Metabolic pathway discovery by genomics and activation of cryptic pathways for drug discovery
Guest seminars (GS1 and GS2)
GS1 Dianne Newman – “From iron oxides to infections: roles for redox-active antibiotics in microbial survival and development”
GS2 Alison Foster – "Colour, smell and taste – the beautiful world of plants and chemistry"
Hands-on computer workshops (CW1 and CW2)
These will go well beyond the topics covered in previous summer schools. Microbial genomes can now be sequenced in a matter of days. Automated annotation is fast becoming the preferred method of annotation as opposed to the careful manual annotation of just a few years ago. Transcriptomics is moving from microarray hybridization to RNA-seq and protein DNA interactions are being studied at the whole-genome level by ChIP-seq. The first workshop will describe the formats of data coming from such high-throughput technologies and demonstrate tools and methods for turning these data into conclusions and knowledge. The second workshop will introduce software and web sites for the identification and analysis of metabolic gene clusters, especially, but not exclusively, those for polyketides and non-ribosomal peptides. These websites are ideal for analysing cryptic biosynthetic gene clusters and making structural predictions about their metabolic products, providing examples of the increasing power of bioinformatics for deducing details of biosynthetic pathways from DNA sequences and hence aiding in the discovery of novel, useful compounds. The associated lecture (L13), after the workshop, will describe examples of the experimental discovery of novel metabolites using the principles developed in the workshop.