Sarah E. O'ConnorFRS 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.[1]
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[4] or oxidase[5] results in novel variants of the molecules not found in nature.
^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. PMID11969430.
^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. ISSN0002-7863. PMID22050348.
