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Sarah E. O'Connor FRS is an American natural product chemist working to understand the molecular machinery involved in assembling important plant natural products – vinblastine, morphine, iridoids, secologanin – and how changing the enzymes involved in this pathway lead to diverse analogs. She was a Project Leader at the John Innes Centre in the UK between 2011 and 2019. O'Connor was appointed by the Max Planck Society in 2018 to head the Department of Natural Product Biosynthesis at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, taking up her role during 2019.

Education

O'Connor received her Ph.D. working with Barbara Imperiali on conformational effects induced by large proteins at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, where she worked on epothiolone biosynthesis with Professor Christopher T. Walsh. She later returned to MIT as a professor from 2003 to 2010.

Research

O'Connor's work involves detailed study of many important species of medicinally-relevant plants: Rauvolfia serpentina, Catharanthus roseus, and Aspergillus japonicus. Her lab utilizes bioinformatics and enzyme characterization to uncover new pathways by which plants construct these molecules. Insertion of new enzymes, for example a halogenase or oxidase results in novel variants of the molecules not found in nature.

Awards and honors

• Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry 2011
• Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award 2011
• Wain Medal 2013
• Elected to European Molecular Biology Organization 2017
• European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant 2018
• Royal Society of Chemistry Perkin Prize for Organic Chemistry 2019
• Honorary Member of the Faculty of Chemistry and Earth Sciences at University of Jena 2022
• Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products of the American Chemical Society 2021
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize 2023
• Elected Fellow of the Royal Society 2023
• Docteure honoris causa, Université de Tours, France, 2024
• Prelog Medal and Lectureship, Laboratory of Organic Chemistry of ETH Zurich 2024
• Elected Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina 2024

References

1. "Sarah O'Connor will become new director at our institute". Retrieved 2018-12-20.
2. Viegas, J. (2013-12-02). "Profile of Barbara Imperiali". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 110 (52): 20850–20851. Bibcode:2013PNAS..11020850V. doi:10.1073/pnas.1321020110. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 3876202. PMID 24297879.
3. O’Connor, Sarah E.; Chen, Huawei; Walsh, Christopher (2002). "Enzymatic Assembly of Epothilones: The EpoC Subunit and Reconstitution of the EpoA-ACP/B/C Polyketide and Nonribosomal Peptide Interfaces". Biochemistry. 41 (17): 5685–5694. doi:10.1021/bi020006w. PMID 11969430.
4. Glenn, Weslee S.; Nims, Ezekiel; O’Connor, Sarah E. (2011-12-07). "Reengineering a Tryptophan Halogenase To Preferentially Chlorinate a Direct Alkaloid Precursor". Journal of the American Chemical Society. 133 (48): 19346–19349. doi:10.1021/ja2089348. ISSN 0002-7863. PMID 22050348.
5. Caputi, Lorenzo; Franke, Jakob; Farrow, Scott C.; Chung, Khoa; Payne, Richard M. E.; Nguyen, Trinh-Don; Dang, Thu-Thuy T.; Carqueijeiro, Inês Soares Teto; Koudounas, Konstantinos (2018-05-03). "Missing enzymes in the biosynthesis of the anticancer drug vinblastine in Madagascar periwinkle". Science. 360 (6394): 1235–1239. Bibcode:2018Sci...360.1235C. doi:10.1126/science.aat4100. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 29724909.
6. "Wain medal lecture – School of Biosciences – University of Kent". www.kent.ac.uk. Retrieved 2018-10-18.
7. Sponge, Creative. "Sarah O'Connor elected into EMBO | John Innes Centre". www.jic.ac.uk. Retrieved 2018-10-17.
8. "RSC Perkin Prize for Organic Chemistry 2019 Winner". Royal Society of Chemistry. 2019. Retrieved 7 May 2019.
9. "Zwei neue Ehrenmitglieder" (in German). Retrieved 2023-10-30.
10. "ACS 2022 national award winners". Retrieved 2021-10-04.
11. "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Preise 2023". Retrieved 2022-12-08.
12. "Sarah O'connor". royalsociety.org. Retrieved 2023-05-24.
13. "Sarah Ellen O'Connor". Retrieved 2024-11-08.
14. "Prelog Lecture". Retrieved 2024-11-08.
15. Member page at https://www.leopoldina.org, retrieved on November 8, 2024

• American molecular biologists
• American women biologists
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
• Living people
• American women academics
• 21st-century American women
• Max Planck Institute directors
• Fellows of the Royal Society