Polyketides again

I've been thinking lately that I would like to go into polyketide chemistry, lately. I'm going to work in a lab this summer that works with bacterial polyketides, and as far as I can tell, the whole field pretty much brings my all my interests together. Even in light of what I said about combinatorial chemistry (and in this case, biology) which is an aspect of playing around with biosynthetic genes.

It's one area of chemical biology that has caught my interest this year (which is basically when I started browsing the chemical biology lit). It relies heavily on organic and bioorganic chemistry, but also genetics and even tracing evolutionary pathways (like this review that talks about how the classifications of polyketide synthases are a little rigid). There's a med chem/natural products discovery aspect to it, since a lot of these structures are really promising medicinally as antibiotics and chemotherapeutic agents (and like I posted yesterday, the genome-mining approach). There's a synthetic organic aspect because a lot of these structures are good targets for total syntheses due to their medicinal qualities. There's an enzymology aspect because a lot of these biosynthetic enzymes have really interesting proprieties. And then there's even some work on trying to harness enzymes that do mechanistically biosynthetic transformations hard to emulate with classical reagents for use in total synthesis, like this total chemoenzymatic synthesis. There's a structural biology aspect too--like this paper looking the structural basis for polyketide synthases docking and substrate specificity. I suspected there would be some biomimetic organic synthesis based on some of these bacterial polyketide biosynthetic pathways out there, and a quick google search told me that there's is, indeed, loads of work being done in that area.

I've started bookmarking webages of labs that publish in this area (and other areas that look interesting) because...well, I figure if I still want to go into this (kind of specialized) area by the time I decide to apply to grad school in a couple years, that's probably a decent approach. It just seems like such a promising area for me and for my desire to bring all these interests of mine together. And just to see where it goes generally. It's not a cutting-edge new field, but just a field that keeps getting cooler and cooler as our tools to do science get cooler and cooler.