Gavin Williams ☑️

Bio

Gavin received his B.Sc in Biochemistry (First Class Honors) from the University of Wales, and completed his PhD under the supervision of Dr Alan Berry at the University of Leeds. He then completed a postdoc at UW-Madison with Prof Jon Thorson, was appointed Assistant Professor at NC State in 2009, promoted to Associate Professor in 2015 and Full Professor in 2020. Gavin received the NSF CAREER Award inn 2013, was named a University Faculty Scholar in 2015 and LORD Distinguished Scholar in 2019, and received the Chancellor’s Innovation Award in 2016 and 2020.

We are developing a genes-to-molecules synthetic biology pipeline for the synthesis, diversification, and discovery of natural products for drug discovery. We are interested in (1) how natural products are biosynthesized in Nature, (2) how to reprogram natural product biosynthesis to make new analogues, and (3) structure-function relationship studies of biologically active natural products.

Area(s) of Expertise

The Williams Lab is interested in combining the power of biology and organic chemistry to provide access to new complex organic molecules. More specifically, we leverage enzyme engineering, biocatalysis, metabolic engineering, organic chemistry, and synthetic biology to access and diversify the structures of natural products. These efforts form an innovative and powerful platform for drug discovery.

Publications

• Engineering of a Malonyl-CoA Ligase for Production of Fluorinated Polyketide Extender Units , CHEMBIOCHEM (2024)
• Current State-of-the-Art Toward Chemoenzymatic Synthesis of Polyketide Natural Products , CHEMBIOCHEM (2023)
• Targeted enzyme modifications enable regioselective biosynthesis of fluorinated polyketides , CHEM CATALYSIS (2022)
• Computationally-guided exchange of substrate selectivity motifs in a modular polyketide synthase acyltransferase , NATURE COMMUNICATIONS (2021)
• Development of Genetically Encoded Biosensors for Reporting the Methyltransferase-Dependent Biosynthesis of Semisynthetic Macrolide Antibiotics , ACS SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY (2021)
• Protein engineering for natural product biosynthesis and synthetic biology applications , PROTEIN ENGINEERING DESIGN & SELECTION (2021)
• Transcription factor-based biosensors: a molecular-guided approach for natural product engineering , CURRENT OPINION IN BIOTECHNOLOGY (2021)
• An artificial pathway for polyketide biosynthesis , Nature Catalysis (2020)
• Cheminformatics Analysis and Modeling with MacrolactoneDB , Scientific Reports (2020)
• Computationally-guided exchange of substrate selectivity motifs in a modular polyketide synthase acyltransferase , (2020)