Nancy Keller
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Microbiology & Immunology
Molds and other filamentous fungi make many of the medicines and farm chemicals people rely on, including penicillin, the cholesterol drug lovastatin and the immune-suppressing drug cyclosporin. Some of the same fungi also cause deadly infections.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Biochemistry
Genetics
- Topics
fungal natural products
secondary metabolites
isocyanides
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Dec 2029
What they work on
- Determine the chemical products of isocyanide synthase (ICS) gene clusters that carry unusual enzymes or target proteins, using molecular and chemical analysis of fungi found by the lab's genome-mining pipeline.
- Test whether fungal isocyanides control which microbes make up a microbiome, and whether this depends on metal levels such as copper, using ecological and molecular experiments.
- Develop computational approaches that reveal the general rules by which fungi organize the making of natural products, to open new routes for discovering compounds.
- Identify the oxylipins, fat-derived signaling molecules, and the gene-control cascades that drive invasive branching growth of Aspergillus fumigatus filaments.
- Characterize the G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) that the fungus and host cells use to recognize each other's oxylipins, and what this recognition does to fungal growth and white blood cell function.
More about the research
This research asks how fungi build and use small chemical compounds, both to find new useful molecules and to understand how a fungus communicates with the human body during disease.
Why it matters
Fungal compounds are a major source of drugs. Better ways to find unknown ones could yield new leads against growing threats to human health. Invasive aspergillosis is often fatal in people with weakened immune systems. GPCRs are already the target of about 40% of current drugs, so mapping the fungus-host signaling system could reveal new ways to block invasive fungal growth in patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Javier Tabima Restrepo
Clark University, MA·Ecology & Evolution
Reconstruct the evolutionary relationships among Basidiobolus species, using genome sequences from fungal samples collected around the world.
Reed Stubbendieck
Oklahoma State University, OK·Microbiology & Immunology
Culture Dolosigranulum pigrum from nasal swabs and test its inhibition of multiple Staphylococcus aureus strains with co-culture plate assays under conditions mimicking the human nose.
Mohammad R Seyedsayamdost
Princeton University, NJ·Chemistry
Use high-throughput elicitor screening (HiTES) and genome-guided searches to uncover cryptic natural products in human microbiome bacteria, including radical SAM-modified peptides and selenium-containing metabolites.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
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