Short description of project
Fungal secondary metabolites (SMs) have immense medical significance. The best example being the antibiotic Penicillin that has saved countless of lives since its discovery, while many other fungal SMs have also been shown to possess important therapeutic properties with some already being used in the clinics to treat human diseases. Genome analysis has uncovered a huge repertoire of SM biosynthetic gene clusters in fungi, indicating the enormous potentials of fungi and fungal SMs for drug discovery. However, the majority of fungal SM genes are silent and do not produce SM under standard laboratory conditions, posing a major obstacle in SM discovery. This project aims to unlock the treasure box of Aspergillus nidulans, which is renowned for its SM potentials, through systematically activating all predicted SM gene clusters one by one to induce SM production. A collection of different SM cluster-activated strains have been generated and many different SMs are produced. We expect many of them are novel and will screen them for antibiotic, anti-fungal or anti-tumor activities. A combination of Genome Engineering, Bioinformatics, Functional Genomics and Analytical Chemistry methods will be applied to achieve the goals of this project. Preliminary results indicate that a few of them have anti-bacteria and anti-cancer activities. We will study those SMs in more details.
Information of Offered Internship
Level of Internship Hours per Month
Level 3 - 60 hours
Commencement Month
June
Duration
6 Months
Internship requirements: i.e. work, practice and training
Individual who is enthusiastic, willing to learn, innovative and can work independently are preferred.