Ola Pasternak, a recently minted Queen’s Chemistry graduate, has joined the group as a MSc student. She will be investigating the biosynthesis of fluorinated natural products. Welcome aboard Ola!

PhD student David Simon is the lucky recipient of a R. Samuel McLaughlin fellowship. This award will support his studies on the effect of regulatory genes on the proteome and metabolome of Streptomyces calvus, the producer of the fluorinated molecule nucleocidin. Well done David!

MSc student Kaitlyn Pinkett is the recipient of a prestigious NSERC award. This award will support her MSc studies involving the biosynthesis of nucleocidin. Well done Kaitlyn!

Sophia-Klara Gassenschmidt from the University of Freiburg will be hanging out in the Zechel lab for 5 weeks to get some experience in enzyme catalysis and natural product biosynthesis. Welcome Sophia!

DLZ had the privilege of being the keynote speaker to open the 8th annual Marine Natural Products Conference at Dalhousie University (August 15th-17th). This is a grad student focused meeting that is held by the East Coast natural products community. Many thanks to David Jakeman of Dalhousie for the invitation to participate in this fantastic meeting.

DLZ and recent MSc graduate Jacqueline Séguin are pleased to announce that their invited review on PhnZ is now published in the Encyclopedia of Inorganic and Bioinorganic Chemistry! A PDF copy of this chapter is available in our publication list.

The Zechel lab is the grateful recipient of an NSERC Discovery Grant worth $300,000 over 5 years! This was awarded to our grant proposal entitled “From Genes to Molecules: Mining Microbial Genomes for New Enzyme Reactions”. We are equally excited that our proposal was one of the few to be selected for a Discovery Accelerator Supplement worth … More NSERC invests in Zechel lab

The Zechel lab had a busy Winter term and is enjoying the transition to summer. A quick review of the past few months: DLZ had the privilege of visiting Trent University for a seminar in March. Many thanks to Steven Rafferty for the invitation and kind hospitality! Fourth year honour students Jessie Hebbert and Akpevweoghene … More An update…..

DLZ had the privilege of giving a seminar to the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at WLU on January 29th. Many thanks to Prof. Geoff Horsmann, a fellow traveller in phosphonate biochemistry, for organizing a great visit and the opportunity to tour a wonderful multidisciplinary department.

Congratulations to MSc student Kaitlyn, who is the happy recipient of an Ontario-Baden-Württemburg student exchange award! This award will allow Kaitlyn to visit the lab of Prof. Andreas Bechthold at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg, Germany, this summer, where she will investigate the biosynthesis of nucleocidin.