Grace Kenney, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, has received a New Investigator Grant from the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation for research on “An Unappreciated Yet Widespread Route to the Biosynthesis of Peptidic Natural Products.” New Investigator Grants are awarded to researchers at the beginning of their independent careers who are pursuing basic scientific research.
Research in the Kenney lab uses biochemical, computational, and microbiological approaches to explore new areas of microbial chemistry. Microbes are talented chemists that use enzymes to carry out challenging chemical reactions – frequently surpassing their human counterparts in their ability to perform these reactions with high precision under mild conditions. The complex compounds ("natural products") produced by microbes have also been an ongoing source of antibiotics and chemotherapeutic agents. However, in even the best-understood microbes, many enzymes, pathways, and compounds remain entirely unstudied. These represent enzymes that cannot be used for biocatalysis, pathways in pathogens that cannot be targeted with antibiotics, and compounds that cannot be tested for antibiotic or chemotherapeutic activity. Kenney’s group is mapping these uncharted areas of microbial chemistry, with a particular focus on identifying families of enzymes that use metals to carry out complex chemical transformations, and on exploring families of natural products that are poorly detected by current techniques.
Before joining the faculty at Pitt, Kenney was a Merck Fellow of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, pursuing postdoctoral research at Harvard University. Kenney's doctoral research at Northwestern University was supported by an American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship and was preceded by a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For more information: https://kaufman.pittsburghfoundation.org/kaufmanrelease2025
