Benjamin Philmus

The Philmus lab is interested in the natural products (aka secondary metabolites) produced by both microorganisms and plants.

We engage in a multidisciplinary research program that involves genome mining and bioinformatic tools, natural products chemistry, molecular biology and protein biochemistry.

We are developing new genome mining methods to prioritize gene clusters identified during the recent boom of genome sequences and heterologous expression techniques for cyanobacterial natural products. We are also interested in the biochemical mechanisms that organisms utilize to form some of the impressive structures found in natural products.

Students that join the Philmus lab will learn a variety of techniques including microbiology, molecular biology, protein biochemistry and analytical chemistry.

Our lab uses a multitude of techniques during our research including bacterial culture and fermentation, assay development and high throughput screening, molecular biology, bacterial genetics, spectroscopy (NMR, UV-vis, IR, and fluorescence), mass spectrometry and chromatography (HPLC).