Office: Chatt G19 (John Innes Centre) E-mail: Sarah.O’Connor@jic.ac.uk; Sarah.OConnor@uea.ac.uk Tel/fax: +44 (0)1603 450334/+44 (0)1603 450018 School position: Synergy Lecturer in Chemical Sciences

PhD Studentship available: How Do Enzymes Evolve in Plants to Generate New Chemical Reactions?

Sarah O’Connor joined the faculty of UEA in 2011, where she is also a Project Leader at the John Innes Centre. She performed her graduate work at both Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was an Irving Sigal post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. After her post-doctoral work, she became assistant and then associate professor of Chemistry at MIT. Her work has been recognized by several awards, including an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship, the American Chemical Society Pfizer Award and the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.

Her research focuses understanding how natural product pathways work, with a particular emphasis on plant-derived alkaloids. The organization of natural product pathways in plants pose many exciting research challenges that have only begun to be addressed. Her group has made inroads into the mechanistic study of some of the biochemical transformations observed in plant alkaloid biosynthesis, and, in parallel with these efforts, her group has also engineered the substrate specificity of alkaloid biosynthetic enzymes and implemented these enzymes in metabolic engineering efforts. This has led to the successful use of plant tissue for the production of “new-to-nature” compounds. Finally, her group’s research has also begun to address the challenging problem of elucidating the uncharacterized genes of plant metabolic pathways.

Selected publications
A stereoselective hydroxylation step of alkaloid biosynthesis in Catharanthus roseus.
L. A. Giddings, D. K. Liscombe, J. P. Hamilton, K. L. Childs, D. DellaPenna, C. R. Buell, S. E. O’Connor
J. Biol. Chem., 2011, 286, 16751-16757.

Integrating carbon-halogen bond formation into medicinal plant metabolism.
W. Runguphan, Q. Xudong, S. E. O’Connor
Nature, 2010, 468, 461-464.

A homolog of tocopherol C-methyltransferases catalyzes N-methylation in anticancer alkaloid biosynthesis.
D. K. Liscombe, A. R. Usera, S. E. O’Connor
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2010, 107, 18793-18798.

Controlling a structural branch point in ergot alkaloid biosynthesis.
J. Z. Cheng, C. M. Coyle, D. M. Panaccione, S. E. O’Connor
J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2010, 132, 12835-12837.