Steven Bruner, Ph.D
Professor of Chemistry
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Steven Bruner’s research focuses on the study of natural products as a source for bioactive compounds, including antibiotics, anticancer drugs and a wide range of therapeutic agents.
The Bruner Lab incorporates interdisciplinary and collaborative science using synthetic organic chemistry, protein structural biology, synthetic biology and mechanistic enzymology to gain detailed insight into the biosynthesis and utilities of bioactive natural products. The enzymes responsible for constructing these small molecules are structurally complex machines that catalyze challenging chemical transformations. Biochemical and structural analysis provides unique insight into chemistry and guides engineering approaches.
Bruner earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University and continued with postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School.
He leads an interdisciplinary team that investigates topics such as genome mining for natural products, enzymology of biosynthetic pathways, and the metabolic role of microbial molecules in human health. His work spans fundamental inquiries into enzyme mechanisms to translational aims in synthetic biology and drug discovery.
Their work focuses on two sources of natural products: the marine environment and the human microbiome. The ocean has a vast and largely underexplored biodiversity of potential therapeutic natural products. The team is targeting sea sponges and associated cyanobacteria using genome mining – an approach to identify pathways encoding bioactive compounds through computational analysis of DNA sequences. They are also looking at the human microbiota, which plays an integral role in regulating human physiology and disease. The gut microbiota, in particular, constitutes a complex, diverse community of microorganisms that influence human physiology, clinical responses to drugs, and disease progression.
“While at UF, Dr. Bruner has established a nationally and internationally recognized research program in chemical biology,” said chemistry department Chair Ronald K. Castellano. “His group is at the forefront of the natural products therapeutic field.”
Bruner continues to drive forward both fundamental chemical biology and application, mentoring the next generation of scientists and expanding our toolkit for creating valuable natural products.