Summer in Germany; Polyketide Biosynthesis

As I may or may not have posted before, this summer I'm going to do a lab internship in Jena Germany at the Hans Knoll Institute: Leibniz Institute for Natural Products Research and Infection Biology in the department of biomolecular chemistry in Christian Hertweck's group.

The story of how this works is the following: I was writing a paper for my biochemistry seminar which focused on chemical biology and I stumbled upon work he was doing with polyketide biosynthetic enzymes in the aureothin (a Streptomyces thioluteus polyketide) pathway. Specifically, AurH, an enzyme catalyzes the chiral oxidation of a THF ring. This paper caught my attention as a mechanistic paper that dissected how the enzyme worked to act as a catalyst and this paper* used the enzyme in a stereospecific total chemoenzymatic synthesis. I read about how they figured which enzyme did the oxidation using molecular biology methods, along with how they figured out how the enzyme worked with biochemical methods, and then their application synthetically. It intrigued me because it was basically exactly the sort of research I want to be doing. It seamlessly integrates biology and chemistry. It relies on both synthetic organic chemistry and molecular biology. Dissecting mechanistically interesting biosynthetic steps that are difficult to mimic with classical reagents is just a really fascinating area of study to me. So I wrote a review paper for my class about research from his lab.

So one day, kind of on a whim I emailed Christian Hertweck, the PI with my CV. He was impressed with my background and my strong desire to do interdisciplinary science and offered me a summer internship at the HKI. I've been in correspondance all year working out the details. So I will be in Germany this summer doing chemical biology research.

It hasn't really hit me that I will be in Germany this summer doing exactly the sort of science I want to be doing. It seems like such a lucky shot in the dark.

I'm so pumped for this summer and next year. I like learning, so classes are alright, but what I really like is doing research. It reminds me "oh yes, this is why I study science."

Also, this will be my fourth consecutive summer in a lab, along with doing research in my prof's lab during the year for a bit and an undergraduate thesis. Although not my motivation for wanting to be in the lab in the summer, that's gotta look attractive to graduate schools, right?

*As a tangent, I also really like the journal ChemBioChem, which is a European chemical biology journal published by Wiley. ACS Chemical Biology puts out a few interesting articles, but it feels uninspiring a lot of the time (and virtually indistinguishable from what goes into ACS Biochemistry), and Nature Chemical Biology seems differently focused. There is some interesting bioorganic work being done here but the the mentality seems different somehow. It seems like the organic community is more seemlessly integrated in this European journal. More on this later.