with highest honor in chemistry, summa cum laude, in 2002 from Williams College,[3][4] where she published her first paper on the synthesis of (-)-hennoxazole A in the lab of professor Thomas E.
There she proposed the novel idea of using an asymmetric catalyst to control chemical bond formation across large, cyclic molecules to form the favored stereoisomer.
[6] She then made the switch from organic chemistry to chemical biology as she pursued a postdoctoral fellowship from 2008 through 2011 at Harvard Medical School with natural products researcher Christopher Walsh.
"[10] Examples of bioinformatic analyses utilized in the Balskus lab are; phylogenetics, sequence alignments, homology modeling, and DNA annotation.
[11] Another key publication, A prominent glycyl radical enzyme in human gut microbiomes metabolizes trans-4-hydroxy-L-proline[12] outlines an important research approach utilized by Balskus and her team; chemically guided functional profiling.
The SSN is used to interpret data generated by Short-BRED, a quantitative metagenomic analysis tool which uses the amino acid sequences of the enzyme family as input.
"[13] They have been able to develop biocompatible cyclopropanation and hydrogenation reactions to alter the reactivity of microbes by using non-enzymatic catalysts, iron(III) phthalocyanine and palladium, respectively.
In an interview with The Scientist magazine, Balskus pointed out that many drugs such as digoxin[6] and byproducts of human metabolism can be degraded by gut bacteria, leading to lowered effects of these molecules than would be expected.
Overall, the work done by the Balskus lab presents the foundational strategies needed to investigate the human microbiome and to understand how it affects our health.
The major charge of this conference was to "...adopt other disciplines" such as xenobiology, ecology, and interspecies communication[20] to improve the field of microbiome research.