Biocompatible Chemistry

Synthetic organic chemists and synthetic biologists currently use largely orthogonal technologies to access small molecules like pharmaceuticals and commodity chemicals. As the use of biological catalysts and engineered organisms for chemical production grows, it is becoming increasingly evident that future efforts for chemical manufacture will benefit from the integration and unified expansion of these two fields. An underexplored strategy for manipulating metabolic pathways and intermediates is the introduction of non-enzymatic reactions from organic synthesis into living systems. In this talk, I will describe efforts to develop biocompatible chemistry: non-enzymatic transformations that can be used to alter the structures of small molecules in the presence of living organisms. Interfacing such reactions directly with bacterial metabolism offers new opportunities to use biology for small molecule synthesis as well as novel approaches for manipulating the growth and behavior of living organisms.