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Professor Ganesan
For millennia, humans have relied on natural products as therapeutic agents. To this day, natural products or their synthetic analogues account for over 50% of our clinical drugs. Is this pipeline exhausted? The answer is a resounding no! Less than 10% of plant species worldwide are investigated in terms of biological activity. Microbial natural product discovery is even more rudimentary as 99% of species cannot be successfully cultured in the laboratory. Meanwhile, the remaining 1% do not express their full potential of natural product diversity outside their natural environment.
Our research is focused on investigating the biological properties of natural products from a variety of sources including bacteria, fungi, alga, and plants. We have ongoing collaborations with botanists in Africa and Malaysia who source rare species and those with a history of use traditional medicine. Recently, we reported the first study of Garcinia caudiculata from Borneo and identified a new meroterpenoid caudiquinol. We collect and culture local microorganisms and recently sequenced the full genome of a novel parasitic Gibellula fungus that grows on spiders. Using innovative fermentation conditions, we isolated novel euglenatide natural products from the common freshwater photosynthetic alga Euglena gracilis. These compounds show potent activity against both drug resistant fungal pathogens and human cancer cell lines.
Publications
Ganesan, A., Aldholmi, M., Ahmad, R., Carretero-Molina, D., Pérez-Victoria, I., Martín, J., Reyes, F., Genilloud, O., Gourbeyre, L., Gefflaut, T., Carlsson, H., Maklakov, A., Field, R. A., O'Neill, E., Wilkinson, B. & O'Connell, M., 2022, Angewandte Chemie-International Edition. 61, 23, e202203175.
Valmiki M, Ping Teo S, de Resende E, Gibbons S, Ganesan A. 2024 Molecules 29(15), 3613;