Christine Beemelmanns

Christine Beemelmanns

The author presented on this page has published her first article as a submitting corresponding author in Angewandte Chemie:

“A Modular Approach to the Antifungal Sphingofungin Family: Concise Total Synthesis of Sphingofungin A and C”: L. Raguž, C.-C. Peng, M. Kaiser, H. Görls, C. Beemelmanns, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2021, 60, doi.org/10.1002/anie.202112616; Angew. Chem. 2021, 133, doi.org/10.1002/anie.202112616.

I am waiting for the day when someone will discover the first microbes on Mars that are able to make antibiotics.

The greatest scientific advance of the last decade was the development of rapid genome sequencing tools and the many open-source web-based analyses tools, from which all fields of natural product chemistry have benefitted.

My favorite example of chemistry/science in everyday life is parafilm and Teflon.

The most important future applications of my research are likely to come when we find an antibiotic that is easy to produce and can be used for treatment of infections.

The most amusing chemistry adventure in my career was hanging upside down in a termite mound measuring the volatile organic compounds produced by their food fungus.

I chose chemistry as a career because I was always passionate about the 3D structures of molecules and how I could create and make these molecules.

A key experience in my education / career was that writing compelling manuscripts and proposals is one of the essential factors to become successful in academia.

Young professors / group leaders / principal investigators are not prepared for how long it might take and how stressful it might be to get a permanent position.

The biggest change in my scientific working environment in the past 10 years has been to establish a research group in natural product chemistry

My group has fun by playing table soccer.

If I were not a scientist, I would be a veterinarian, paleontologist, detective … or whatever my 5-year-old alter ego is dreaming of.

My biggest motivation is to accomplish and create something that makes a difference.

Guaranteed to make me laugh is listening to stories or ideas my son loves to tell me.

My motto is that new findings always pave the way to new intriguing research questions, and that Mother Nature might have already invented it.

The most important quality of a role model is being an active role model.

In retrospect I would never again drink Vodka-Cola or Saurer Apfel.

Behind the Science

I have been intrigued by microbial sphingolipids and structurally related sphingofungins, which act as natural inhibitors of sphingolipid biosynthesis. Screening current literature made clear that a short and efficient synthesis of sphingofungins was urgently required to push envisaged biochemical studies forward, to complement the mostly rudimentary descriptions of this compound class, and to showcase that today's organic chemistry allows reducing total synthetic step counts significantly. While our first approach was not successful, Luka took the challenge and developed a second strategy that was applicable to many different building blocks. The major obstacle is the purification of these amphiphilic natural products.