CIIMAR’s Thalassa Seminar with Joleen Masschelein | 1st Floor
Antimicrobial resistance is a growing global health threat and the need for new antibiotics, especially against Gram-negative pathogens, has never been greater.
Microorganisms produce an incredible diversity of bioactive natural products, most of which remain undiscovered.
Our lab develops new genome mining strategies to uncover overlooked biosynthetic pathways, unusual enzymes and novel chemical scaffolds. Beyond discovery, we also investigate how biosynthetic pathways can be engineered to generate new natural product variants with improved biological activities and therapeutic potential.
In this seminar, I will highlight how combining genomics, microbial ecology, synthetic biology and emerging AI-based approaches can help us uncover hidden microbial chemistry, expand the chemical diversity of natural products and open new avenues for antibiotic discovery.
Joleen Masschelein is an Associate Professor at KU Leuven and Group Leader at VIB (Belgium). After obtaining her PhD in 2015, she pursued postdoctoral research at the University of Warwick as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow. She received an ERC Starting Grant in 2023 and the EFMC Prize for Young Chemical Biologists/Medicinal Chemists in Academia in 2025. Her research integrates microbiology, chemistry and biotechnology to discover novel bioactive natural products, unravel their biosynthesis and biological functions, and engineer microbial production platforms.
In case of any questions, please contact CIIMAR’s Seminar team, at seminars@ciimar.up.pt