Overview
Synthetic chemical libraries are a common source of drug discovery molecules. The challenge is that these libraries adhere to synthetic structures and biological activities. By contrast, naturally occurring chemicals have a vast diversity of structure but their industrial or medical uses are limited due to the complexity and inaccessibility of these natural products.
Can we then take these synthesized chemical libraries and expose them to a plethora of plant enzymes that could increase the diversity of these compounds exponentially, and find new functions?
Drs. Eiji Nambara, Peter McCourt (University of Toronto) and Dario Bonetta (University of Ontario Institute and Technology), aim to just that. The team is using plant genomics resources to create libraries of various chemical compounds for industrial uses. In an effort to produce the advantages of these two systems, this project aims to set up an enhanced system to evaluate metabolic conversion of diverse chemical library by plant xenobiotic enzymes, which will be useful sources to identify chemicals with new functions.