Emily Balskus facts for kids

Emily P. Balskus is an American scientist born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1980. She studies how chemistry works in living things, especially tiny organisms. Since 2011, she has been a professor at Harvard University in the Chemistry and Chemical Biology department. She is currently the Morris Kahn Professor. Dr. Balskus has written over 80 scientific papers and given more than 170 talks. She also helps review articles for important science journals like Nature.

Early Life and Education

Emily Balskus was interested in science from a young age. In elementary school, she did a science fair project about mixing things and how matter stays the same. When she was in high school, she discovered chemistry. She loved "manipulating molecules in lab." This led to her interest in how living things create molecules. Dr. Balskus has said that her female science teachers likely inspired her to become a scientist.

College and Advanced Degrees

In 2002, Dr. Balskus earned her first degree in chemistry from Williams College. There, she published her first paper about making a molecule called (-)-hennoxazole A. She then went to the University of Cambridge in England as a Churchill Scholar. She earned another degree in chemistry there.

Dr. Balskus received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2008. She worked with a chemist named Eric Jacobsen. She came up with a new idea to use special tools called asymmetric catalysts. These tools help control how chemical bonds form in large molecules. This makes sure the molecules have the correct shape. After her Ph.D., she changed her focus from just chemistry to chemical biology. From 2008 to 2011, she did research at Harvard Medical School with Christopher Walsh. They studied how scytonemin is made. Scytonemin is like a "microbial sunscreen" that protects tiny organisms from harmful UV light. In 2009, she also learned about microbial ecology and environmental microbiology at the Marine Biology Lab at Woods Hole.

What Does the Balskus Lab Research?

The Balskus lab studies the human microbiome. This is the trillions of tiny organisms, like bacteria, protozoa, and viruses, that live inside and on our bodies. These microorganisms have many genes—about 200 times more than humans do! Many of the enzymes (special proteins that speed up reactions) in these organisms are not yet understood.

Understanding Microbial Enzymes

One main goal of the Balskus lab is to figure out how these microbial enzymes work. They also want to find which specific microbes, genes, and enzymes are responsible for important activities in our bodies. A third goal is to create safe ways to control and study microbial chemistry inside living things.

How Does Bioinformatics Help?

The Balskus lab uses Bioinformatics a lot. Bioinformatics is the science of storing, finding, and analyzing large amounts of biological information. They use it to study the many genes in the human microbiome. For example, they use methods like phylogenetics (studying evolutionary relationships), sequence alignments (comparing DNA or protein sequences), and DNA annotation (identifying genes).

A big discovery by the Balskus lab was finding the enzyme that changes choline into trimethylamine. This change was already known, but the enzyme responsible was a mystery. They found a group of genes needed for this process. They thought these genes might code for a special type of enzyme called a glycyl radical enzyme (GRE). This type of enzyme had not been known to do this kind of chemical work before. By comparing the gene sequences and making models of the enzyme, they found key parts that supported their idea. This research is important because choline metabolism might be linked to health issues like fish malodor syndrome and heart disease.

Chemically-Guided Functional Profiling

Another important method used by Dr. Balskus's team is called chemically-guided functional profiling. First, they pick an enzyme family they want to study, like the GRE family. They compare the amino acid sequences of all the enzymes in that family. Knowing how some enzymes in the family work, they create a "sequence similarity network" (SSN). This network groups enzymes that likely have similar jobs. The SSN helps them understand data from a tool called Short-BRED. Short-BRED uses enzyme sequences to find unique markers for each group of enzymes. It then figures out how common these enzymes are in the human microbiome. This tool helps scientists find new enzymes and decide which ones to study first based on how abundant they are.

Biocompatible Chemistry

The Balskus lab also uses "biocompatible chemistry." These are chemical reactions that can happen inside living organisms without harming them. They have developed ways to change how microbes react using special non-enzymatic catalysts. For example, they used iron(III) phthalocyanine and palladium to perform reactions that alter microbes.

Another way they use this approach is to help microbes that can't make their own essential nutrients. They use metal-catalyzed reactions to produce these nutrients. For instance, they helped a microbe that couldn't make p-aminobenzoic acid (PABA), which is needed for folic acid. They used a ruthenium catalyst to make the PABA. These successes show that we might be able to control how microbes grow and what chemicals they produce.

Recent Discoveries

In 2019, the Balskus lab figured out how a harmful substance called colibactin damages DNA. They found that a specific part of colibactin breaks DNA strands. The lab also studies how microbes affect drugs in our bodies. Dr. Balskus has noted that gut bacteria can break down many drugs, like digoxin, and even natural body chemicals. This can make the drugs less effective.

Overall, the work from the Balskus lab provides important ways to study the human microbiome. Their goal is to understand how the microbiome affects our health. They hope their research will lead to new ways to treat diseases by focusing on the microbiome, not just the human body itself.

Volunteering and Conferences

Dr. Balskus helped organize the 2019 Keystone Symposia on the gut microbiota. This conference aimed to bring together different fields, like ecology, to improve microbiome research.

Awards and Honors