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Department of Chemistry College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

About Bruner Group

Our group uses an interdisciplinary approach to understand the mechanisms of natural product biosynthetic machinery. The study of these systems exploits our group’s skills in synthetic organic chemistry, protein crystallography and mechanistic enzymology. A detailed understanding of these biosynthetic pathways can be applied to the rational engineering of biologically useful molecules.

Our Research

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Genome Mining

In this project we are employing genome mining approaches to both identify gene clusters responsible for known bioactive, anticancer metabolites, and also identify novel molecules.

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SRP in Pediatric Leukemias

In this project we will use the tools of chemical biology and synthetic biology to study clinically relevant SRP54 mutations.

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Chemistry of Biosynthetic Enzymes

In this project, we will use mechanistic and structural enzymology to look at key pathway enzymes.

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Human Microbiome

In this project we are looking at the biosynthetic machinery of complex and biologically important natural products of the microbiome.

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Bruner Lab News

  • Fall 2025

    Welcome to Katie Devereaux, Abhijeet Deshpande, and Faisal Abdullah Emon, the three newest members of the Bruner Group!

  • Summar 2025

    It was a pleasure having Felix Nöel Quarante in the lab this summer, visiting from AgroParisTech. We miss him, and he surely misses Chick-fil-A! Congratulations to Amit for being awarded the Ruegamer Biochemistry Scholarship. Well-deserved! Congratulations to Peter for being awarded a 2025 Col. Allen R. and Margaret G. Crow Summer Fellowship! Congratulations to ………

  • Spring 2025

    Congratulations to Peter Yang, Anu, and Amit Dutta for passing their qualifying exams and becoming PhD candidates! Congratulations to two of our star undergraduate researchers for their acceptance to PhD programs this fall! George Wu will be attending UNC Chapel Hill and Tiffany Zhou will attend The Ohio State University. We will miss you both! A special congratulations to Anu for solving her first crystal structure!

  • Spring 2024

    Congratulations to Dr. Thisuri Wanniarachchi, Dr. You Hu and Dr. Wen-Ting Chen for successfully defending their dissertations! We’re very proud of all of you and will miss you! See more here: https://twitter.com/BrunerLab
    Congratulations to Nicole Colon Rosa for completing her M.S. program, we all hope to see you again! Congratulations to Peter Yang for presenting his work on the SRP project at the 6th UF Drug Discovery Symposium!

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