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… on to talk about fungal natural products. I can say that I started in fungal natural products – I did my Ph.D. with … actually came from my Peace Corps experience. After I got my undergraduate degree, which was in general biology, I … the fungi vary in number of chromosomes. Like, ironically, yeast, which has a small genome has 15 chromosomes. Where …

… let’s rewind in time a little bit and, before that, what got you into natural products in the first place? ROGER:  So … that was the best part of my undergraduate training. I got to work for Pfizer, who at that time, had a big facility … been quite a lot of thematic diversity. So when we first started out as a research lab, we were also quite focused on …

… natural environment, and so our Director, Nigel Mouncey, started and leads the JGI’s Secondary Metabolites Science … It’s a new group formed under the director who has also got a long background in secondary metabolism. I have been … couple of weeks at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He got me into genomics of microbes, specifically of some that …

… tools to automate sequence design for assembly by Gibson, Yeast recombination and Golden Gate methods SynTrack and …

I might just start out by asking you know how did you get started. I know you’re not classically trained originally in … work for JGI anymore! [LAUGHTER] AARON PURI: Yeah. That got way more serious than I thought all of a sudden! DAN: … and Metagenomes, the IMG platform that JGI has that really got me into that because we had these new genomes that JGI …

It’s a long, wide ranging conversation and I’m so happy we got the chance to talk and that now I can bring it to you. … was going to happen in the first place. And yet everything got canceled due to the pandemic. Dan Udwary: Right. Well, … all manually, and that’s how for me the antiSMASH journey started during my PhD. And then I actually found out, …

… and efforts to refactor entire chromosomes, such as a yeast chromosome project. These advancements contribute to …

… and welcome back to a new session of Natural Prodcast. I’ve got two things I wanted to tell you about in this … in August. And the SIMB meeting was in August. And we started going to some talks. And at the time, it was really … wet. We like to get them where water is flowing and where formations are forming so that we have things to point out …

… one from the 70s in the Scripps library, and in it he’s got shoulder-length hippie hair. So, I’ll put a link to that … time. And I tend to like to ask people, how did they get started? How did you get started, Eric, in natural products? … of that culture too, to the Townsend lab, too, when you got there, eh? ERIC:  I don’t think so. I think that …

… a pretty magical period of time. So that was something that got me hooked, because I could stay connected to this – my … project? Brad: Yeah, that was a really fun project. So we got the Joint Genome Institute interested in a marine … organism has been a lot of fun for us in recent years. Started in 2015, when two things happened. One, a new …

… of a mystery of how you get there. And I just feel like I got super lucky and found an agent that was really a great … I saw what was going on under the microscope, that really got me excited. And so flash forward to college and I’m on a … principles of Western medicine. But in the Amazon, I really started to understand how healers are able to interpret the …

… geosmin, which is a bacterial sacred metabolite, and ergot alkaloids come from fungi, and Taxol from plants. … as building blocks to produce novel molecules. And so we’ve got glycosides being made into sugar-containing compounds, … then. So, Penicillium is a fungus. But as people sort of started exploring these kinds of organisms, they noticed …