Bradley S. Moore

About

Dr. Bradley S. Moore is a Distinguished Professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, with a research focus on understanding the fundamental mechanisms and pathways involved in microbial production of antibiotics, anticancer agents, and other bioactive natural products, particularly from marine microorganisms. His laboratory employs sophisticated approaches at the chemistry-biology interface, including heterologous biosynthesis, mutasynthesis, chemoenzymatic total synthesis, genome mining, and biochemical analysis performed both in vitro and in vivo. His work emphasizes marine microbes, which harbor promising natural compounds such as salinosporamide A, didemnin, taromycin, marinopyrrole, domoic acid, and kainic acid, contributing significantly to drug discovery efforts. Dr. Moore has pioneered biosynthesis and bioengineering of marine natural product drug leads, developed genome mining and synthetic biology techniques for producing new antibiotic and anticancer agents, and elucidated mechanisms of biosynthesis and resistance enzymes. His contributions have advanced understanding of natural product biosynthesis, including decoding neurotoxins from harmful algal blooms, and his research continues to expand the potential of microbial biodiversity as a resource for novel therapeutics.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Bioinformatics
• Biochemistry
• Computational biology
• Biology
• Ecology
• Data science
• Genetics

Selected publications

• Mining genomes to illuminate the specialized chemistry of life

  Nature Reviews Genetics · 2021-06-03 · 249 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Genome mining methods to discover bioactive natural products

  Natural Product Reports · 2021-01-01 · 188 citations

  reviewOpen accessCorresponding

  Covering: 2016 to 2021With genetic information available for hundreds of thousands of organisms in publicly accessible databases, scientists have an unprecedented opportunity to meticulously survey the diversity and inner workings of life. The natural product research community has harnessed this breadth of sequence information to mine microbes, plants, and animals for biosynthetic enzymes capable of producing bioactive compounds. Several orthogonal genome mining strategies have been developed i…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A community resource for paired genomic and metabolomic data mining

  Nature Chemical Biology · 2021 · 129 citations

  biosynthetic origins and metabolite structures.

  DOI

• Molecular forecasting of domoic acid during a pervasive toxic diatom bloom

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024-09-19 · 36 citations

  articleOpen access

  In 2015, the largest recorded harmful algal bloom (HAB) occurred in the Northeast Pacific, causing nearly 100 million dollars in damages to fisheries and killing many protected marine mammals. Dominated by the toxic diatom Pseudo-nitzschia australis , this bloom produced high levels of the neurotoxin domoic acid (DA). Through molecular and transcriptional characterization of 52 near-weekly phytoplankton net-tow samples collected at a bloom hotspot in Monterey Bay, California, we identified activ…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Giant polyketide synthase enzymes in the biosynthesis of giant marine polyether toxins

  Science · 2024-08-08 · 31 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Prymnesium parvum are harmful haptophyte algae that cause massive environmental fish kills. Their polyketide polyether toxins, the prymnesins, are among the largest nonpolymeric compounds in nature and have biosynthetic origins that have remained enigmatic for more than 40 years. In this work, we report the “PKZILLAs,” massive P. parvum polyketide synthase (PKS) genes that have evaded previous detection. PKZILLA-1 and -2 encode giant protein products of 4.7 and 3.2 megadaltons that have 140 and…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Biosynthesis of marine terpenoid natural products

  NIH · $1.6M · 2023–2027

• Natural sources and microbial transformation of marine halogenated pollutants

  NSF · $767k · 2018–2024

• Natural Product Genome Mining

  NIH · $5.8M · 2009–2026

Frequent coauthors

• Paul R. Jensen

  University of California, San Diego

  135 shared

• Pieter C. Dorrestein

  University of California, San Diego

  134 shared

• Joseph P. Noel

  Salk Institute for Biological Studies

  88 shared

• Shaun M. K. McKinnie

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  82 shared

• William Fenical

  Scripps Institution of Oceanography

  79 shared

• Vinayak Agarwal

  IIT@MIT

  68 shared

• Jonathan R. Chekan

  University of North Carolina at Greensboro

  66 shared

• Longkuan Xiang

  Human BioMolecular Research Institute

  61 shared

Awards & honors

• ASP Matt Suffness New Investigator Award (2001)
• Fellow of the Royal Society for Chemistry (2010)
• President of ASP (2013-2014)
• ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2013)
• ETH Visiting Faculty Award (2014)

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