Heads of Laboratories Natural products — or more generally,
genetically encoded small molecules — play a wide variety of
roles in biology and have proved very useful in the development
of small molecule therapeutic agents. Dr. Brady’s research
centers on the discovery, biosynthesis and characterization of
new, genetically encoded small molecules from microbial sources,
with a special focus on those produced by uncultured soil
bacteria and pathogenic bacteria. One of the key revelations to
arise from the large-scale sequencing of bacterial genomic DNA
is that the approaches traditionally used for identifying new
natural products only provide functional access to a small
fraction of the biosynthetic gene clusters present in nature.
These studies indicate that essentially all bacteria — from
those with fully sequenced genomes to those that have not yet
been cultured — are rich sources of unstudied natural product
biosynthetic gene clusters. Using a range of methods from
molecular biology, organic chemistry and m