Graham Hudson, PhD
Biochemistry
Research in the Hudson Lab focuses on discovering biologically active natural products and leveraging chemical, synthetic, and structural biology approaches to decipher and engineer their biosynthesis. Approaching biosynthetic reactions from a structural biology standpoint is key to understanding how these enzymes work 鈥渦nder the hood鈥� and achieve their complex transformations; this knowledge can, in turn, be leveraged to alter substrate scope and/or product profile and enable biocatalytic approaches to their derivatization that are traditionally challenging via purely synthetic means.
A major focus of the Hudson laboratory is the development of AI-augmented bioinformatic platforms for identifying previously uncharacterized biosynthetic pathways and first-in-class natural products from genomic data. These computational approaches will be integrated with laboratory automation and robotics to establish high-throughput pipelines for producing, characterizing, and prioritizing novel molecules. This platform can serve as a springboard for discovering novel natural products and biosynthetic transformations which will be studied through the lens of structural enzymology, enabling the development of versatile biocatalysts and the de novo construction of chimeric biosynthetic pathways to produce new-to-nature molecules.