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Please join us for the Mikashi Award Impact Presentations, presented by the Catherine and Don Kleinmuntz Center for Genomics in Business and Society. We will hear final presentations from Mikashi awardees Dr. Brian Cunningham and Dr. Paul Hergenrother, who will share how Mikashi Award funding supported their work on cancer research. RSVP here. The Mikashi Awards provide consistency and support for developing innovation at the IGB. This funding helps IGB researchers bridge the "gap" between government-supported innovations that result from University research and private sector support of those innovations into commercial products and facilitate the transformation of researchers' discoveries and technologies into useful products services that benefit society.   Introduction Don OrtActing Director, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology Review of Award’s Impact on Research “Development of a new microscopy technology for rapid diagnosis of COVID and cancer”Brian Cunningham, Mikashi Award Winner “Rapid Acting Anticancer Compounds for Hepatocellular Carcinoma”Paul Hergenrother, Mikashi Award Winner Closing Remarks Catherine & Don KleinmunzFounders, Kleinmuntz Center

Abstract - Phosphonic acids are a class of natural products with significant potential for utility in medicine and biotechnology. Underlying the antibiotic, herbicidal, and antiviral activity of many phosphonic acid natural products is their mimicry of cellular phosphate esters and carboxylic acids to inhibit essential metabolic pathways. Although genomics illuminates a growing trove of thousands of gene clusters suggestive of novel phosphonic acids across all microbial taxa, accurate de novo forecasting of their chemical products and inhibitory properties to prioritize discovery is precluded by our nascent understanding of their biosynthetic diversity. In search of methods to improve genomics-enabled discovery of phosphonic acids, my research group seeks to understand universal physiological and biochemical principles underlying the chemical diversity of these natural products. The seminar will describe our efforts to expand and refine the framework of phosphonic acid natural product genomics by the isolation of new compounds from cryptic gene clusters and the discovery of new pathways and enzymes for their biosynthesis.