Plants produce a wealth of useful natural products. These are often structurally complex, limited by difficulties in accessing source species, and beyond the reach of chemical synthesis. The discovery – by Professor Anne Osbourn OBE – that plant genes for specialised pathways are organised like beads on a string has fuelled the finding of novel plant compounds and pathways.
This pioneering work has opened the possibility of producing important drugs in greater volumes and improving the natural defence systems of plants to benefit both people’s health and the sustainability of the planet, which has resulted in the Novo Nordisk Foundation awarding Anne Osbourn the 2023 Novozymes Prize.
The Prize recognises outstanding research or technology contributions that benefit the development of biotechnological science for innovative solutions and is accompanied by DKK 5 million (€672,000).
“Plants produce more than 1 million compounds, but the genes are only known for around 50 complete pathways. Thus, our understanding of how these compounds are synthesised is highly fragmented. Our lab has developed a platform to characterise plant genes and engineer structurally diverse molecules so that we can investigate the relationship between structure and function,” explains Anne Osbourn, Deputy Director of the John Innes Centre and Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia.
“We can basically unlock the chemistry of plants and the instruction manual encoded within the DNA of plant genomes to make not only known molecules and structural analogues but also entirely new-to-nature molecules, because we can mix and match from across the plant kingdom.”
To read the full article, please go to the Novo Nordisk page.
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