Shanshan is a Warwick Antimicrobial Interdisciplinary Early Career Fellow, based in the Chemical Biology Research Facility in the Department of Chemistry. Shanshan's PhD work is focused on "antibiotic biosynthesis and its transcriptional regulation in Streptomyces bacteria".

Project background

Due to the emergence of antimicrobial resistance there is an urgent need to discover and develop new antibiotics. Natural products continue to be the largest source of clinically used antibiotics. Therefore, a better understanding of natural product biosynthetic pathways, and the enzymology underpinning them, is an attractive approach to the development of new strategies for the production of novel antibiotic analogues.

Project Aim

The research project aims to determine the first X-ray crystal structure of a methylase involved in the biosynthesis of antibiotics and will develop a better understanding of the catalytic mechanism employed by the enzyme.

Shanshan Zhou

Department of Chemistry
University of Warwick
Coventry
West Midlands
CV4 7AL

Email: shanshan.zhou@warwick.ac.uk