On May 13th, 2021, Prof. He Haiyan from the department of microbial metabolic engineering gave us a great talk “ New Routes to Nitric Oxide and Nitrite in Streptomyces”. The talk was hosted by Prof. Wu Linzhuan and more than one hundred people from the institute attended.

Nitric oxide and nitrite are not only two key intermediates in the biosynthetic pathway of nitrogen cycle, but also perform important biological functions as chemical signals in humans and other animals and have various applications in medicine.  N -nitrosourea streptozocin and  O -methyl-nitronate enteromycin, are two secondery metabolites isolated from  Streptomyces achromogenes . Dr. He shared the story of biosynthetic studies of these two compounds. He introduced how to discover the biosynthetic gene clusters, how to indicate the charater and function ofthe key enzymes and elucidate the structures of the intermediates during the biosynthetic process. Two distinguished routes originated from L-arginine or glycine were confirmed to be used to generate nitric oxide or nitrite in  Streptomyces achromogenes . The work highlights the discovery of new biosynthetic pathways to those small signal compounds in other organisms and provides new insights to study their biological roles.

At last, Dr. He highlighted the future research in his lab: bio-manufacturing of synthetic drugs and discovery of natural compounds by microbe genome mining.