Benjamin Philmus profile picture.

Benjamin Philmus
Associate Professor
Email
benjamin.philmus@oregonstate.edu
Office Phone
541-737-9396
Address

Weniger Hall 431
103 SW Memorial Place
Corvallis, OR 97331
United States

Biography

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The Philmus lab’s research centers on bioactive natural products (aka secondary metabolites) from bacteria with a focus on cyanobacteria (photosynthetic bacteria). We develop synthetic biology protocols, bioinformatics programs, and analytical chemistry methodologies to identify, isolate and study these compounds with the potential to serve as drug leads to combat cancer and microbial infections. 

The Philmus lab is interested in the natural products (aka secondary metabolites) produced by both microorganisms and plants.

We engage in a multidisciplinary research program that involves genome mining and bioinformatic tools, natural products chemistry, molecular biology and protein biochemistry.

We are developing new genome mining methods to prioritize gene clusters identified during the recent boom of genome sequences and heterologous expression techniques for cyanobacterial natural products. We are also interested in the biochemical mechanisms that organisms utilize to form some of the impressive structures found in natural products.

Students that join the Philmus lab will learn a variety of techniques including microbiology, molecular biology, protein biochemistry and analytical chemistry.

Our lab uses a multitude of techniques during our research including bacterial culture and fermentation, assay development and high throughput screening, molecular biology, bacterial genetics, spectroscopy (NMR, UV-vis, IR, and fluorescence), mass spectrometry and chromatography (HPLC).