Brian O. Bachmann

Stevenson Professor of Chemistry

Dr. Bachmann will be accepting graduate students for Fall 2025.

We study and harness the biosynthetic capabilities of living systems in order to radically accelerate the discovery of new bioactive compounds, and revolutionize how molecules are synthesized.

The vision of the VLBS is threefold: (1) Developing and applying single cell chemical biology techniques, we will unlock the potential of natural products for precision medicine for cancer; (2) Understanding the biosynthesis of biologically active natural products will enable us to engineer new natural products that will become the next generation of drugs to treat human illnesses; (3) Revealing and understanding the evolutionary mechanisms for how nature evolves bioactive natural products, we will develop new paradigms for the construction of biosynthetic pathways for compounds that are not natural products but should be, thereby transforming what are now costly and waste-generating chemical synthetic processes in to ‘green’ and inexpensive processes. These visions are reflected in our projects incorporating methods in biochemistry, human cell biology, chemical synthesis, and microbiology.

Specializations

Chemical Biology, Synthetic Biology, Natural Product Discovery.

Representative Publications

Reisman B.J., Guo H., Ramsey H.E., Wright M.T., Reinfeld B.I., Ferrell P.B., Sulikowski G.A., Rathmell W.K., Savona M.R., Plate L., Rubinstein J.L., Bachmann B.O. Apoptolidin family glycomacrolides target leukemia through inhibition of ATP synthase. Nature Chemical Biology, 2022, 18, 360 - 367.

Earl, D.C., Ferrell P.B. Jr, Leelatian, N., Froese, J.T., Reisman B.J., Irish, J.M., Bachmann, B.O. Discovery of human cell selective effector molecules using single cell multiplexed activity metabolomics. Nature Communications, 2018, 9(1),39

McCulloch, K.M., McCranie, E.K., Smith, J.A., Sarwar, M., Mathieu, J.L., Gitschlag, B.L., Du, Y., Bachmann, B.O., Iverson, T.M., Oxidative cyclizations in orthosomycin biosynthesis expand the known chemistry of oxidase superfamily. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015, 112, 11547-52.

Birmingham, W. R ., Starbird, C. A., Panosian, T. D. Nannemann, D. P., Iverson, T. M., Bachmann, B. O. Bioretrosynthetic construction of a didanosine biosynthetic pathway. Nature Chemical Biology. 2014, 10, 392-399.