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Professor van der Donk received his B.S. from Leiden University, Netherlands, in 1989, and his Ph.D. from Rice University in 1994. He completed postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1997. In 2008, he was appointed as an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research interests include organic chemistry and chemical biology, with a specific focus on the discovery and design of new antibiotics from natural products. His projects combine synthetic organic and protein chemistry to tackle issues at the interface of chemistry and biology, addressing the growing problem of multi-drug resistant bacterial strains that threaten to become immune to commercially available antibiotics. His group explores the mechanisms of action and biosynthesis of various classes of antibiotics, including lantibiotics and phosphonate antibiotics. Notably, cyclic peptides are of increasing interest for their potential applications due to their metabolic stability compared to linear peptides, allowing innovative approaches in bioengineering. Recent advances in genomic sequencing have expanded opportunities for genome mining and the development of new drugs targeting alternative cellular mechanisms.
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