Bacterial sphingolipids – discovery of cryptic pathways expands the ceramide inventory.
About Professor Dominic Campopiano
Dominic
Campopiano is Chair of Industrial Biocatalysis in the School of Chemistry at
the University of Edinburgh. He studied chemistry at the University of Glasgow
(1984–88) then carried out his PhD studies in Chemistry at the University of
Edinburgh under the supervision of Prof. Bob Baxter (1988–91). After post-doctoral
stints with Prof. Bill Shaw in Biochemistry at the University of Leicester and
in Chemistry at Edinburgh, he was appointed to a lectureship in 1998. He was
promoted through the ranks of senior lecturer and reader before taking up his
chair in 2015. He held a Royal Society of Edinburgh/Scottish Executive Personal
Research Fellowship (2006) and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Chemistry (FRSC) in 2018.
He has had a
long-standing interest in natural product biosynthesis and exploring the pathways
and enzymes that catalyse their production. These enzymes can then be used as
biocatalysts to develop greener/more sustainable routes to commodity and high
value chemicals. Over 25 years he has developed many fruitful collaborations
with a number of experts from different fields that include microbiology, human
genetics and structural biology. He has led research programmes that have investigated
the structures and mechanisms of key enzymes from sphingolipid (SL), antibiotic
and vitamin biosynthetic pathways. Research has focused on characterisation of
the first enzyme in the SL pathway, serine palmitoyltransferase (SPT). More
recently he has investigated the biosynthesis of ceramides in various microbes
to understand their role(s) in bacterial and mammalian metabolism.
