The Skaggs School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences

Pieter C. Dorrestein

Pieter C. Dorrestein is an Assistant Professor in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Departments of Pharmacology, Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego.

Dr. Pieter Dorrestein was born in Utrecht, Netherlands, in 1974. He completed his undergraduate at Northern Arizona University under the guidance of Prof. John MacDonald. Pieter continued on to Cornell University for graduate school in the department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology where he worked on metabolite biosynthetic pathways with Prof. Tadhg Begley. During his post-doctoral years, at the University of Illinois, as an NIH-NRSA fellow (co)-sponsored by Prof. Neil Kelleher and Prof. Christopher Walsh, he exploited high-resolution mass spectrometry to elucidate the biosynthesis of natural products of therapeutic value. In September of 2006, Pieter moved to his current position as an assistant professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Departments of Pharmacology, Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC-San Diego. In 2007 Pieter also became a member of the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Dorrestein lab is a chemical biology laboratory that emphasizes mass spectrometric, including proteomic and MALDI-imaging based, approaches to understand the functions of orphan genes from microorganisms responsible for the production of natural products or toxins. In addition, the Dorrestein lab aims to detect and understand the function of post-translational modifications.

Selected Publications

Dorrestein, P.C., Van Lanen, S. G., Li, W. Zhao, C., Deng, Z., Shen, B., Kelleher, N.L., The Bifunctional Glyceryl Transferase/Phosphatase OzmB Belonging to the HAD Superfamily That Diverts 1,3-Bisphosphoglycerate into Polyketide Biosynthesis. Journal of the American Chemical Society (2006) 128 (32), 10386 -10387.

Dorrestein, P.C., Bumpus S. B., Calderone C. T., Garneau-Tsodikova S., Aron Z. D., Straight P.D., Kolter R., Walsh C. T. and Kelleher N. L. Facile Detection of Acyl- and Peptidyl- intermediates on Thiotemplate Carrier Domains via Phosphopantetheinyl Elimination Reactions During Tandem Mass Spectrometry. Biochemistry (2006) 45 (6), 1537 -1546.

Dorrestein, P.C., Kelleher, N.L., Dissecting Non-ribosomal and Polyketide Biosynthetic Machineries Using Electrospray Ionization Fourier-Transform MassSpectrometry. Nat Prod Rep. (2006) 23(6):893-918.

Calderone, C.T., Kowtoniuk, W.E., Kelleher, N.L., Walsh, C.T., Dorrestein, P.C. Convergence of isoprene and polyketide biosynthetic machinery: isoprenyl-S-carrier proteins in the pksX pathway of B. subtilis. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. (2006) 103, 8977-8982.

Meluzzi, D., Zheng, W.H., Hensler, M., Nizet, V., Dorrestein, P.C. Top-down mass spectrometry on low-resolution instruments: characterization of phosphopantetheinylated carrier domains in polyketide and non-ribosomal biosynthetic pathways. Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters. in press. doi:10.1016/j.bmcl. (2007).10.104

Zhang, J., Van Lanen, S. G., Ju, J., Liu, W. Dorrestein, P.C., Li, W., Kelleher, N. L., Shen, B. A. Phosphopantetheinylating polyketide synthase producing a linear polyene to initiate enediyne antitumor antibiotic biosynthesis. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 2008 in press.

Simmons, T. L., Coates R.C., Clark B. R., Engene N., Gonzalez D., Esquenazi, E., Dorrestein P.C., Gerwick W. H. Biosynthetic Origin of Natural Products Isolated from Marine Microorganism-Invertebrate Assemblages. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 2008, in press.

Esquenazi, E., Coates, C., Simmons, L., Gonzalez, D., Gerwick, W.H., Dorrestein, P.C. Visualizing the spatial distribution of secondary metabolites produced by marine cyanobacteria and sponges via MALDI-TOF imaging. Molecular BioSystems. 2008, in press.

List of Publications in Pub Med