Professor Anne Osbourn’s research is focused on plant natural products – biosynthesis, function, mechanisms of metabolic diversification, and metabolic engineering. An important advance from the Osbourn laboratory has been the discovery that in plant genomes the genes needed to make particular plant natural products are often organized in clusters like ‘beads on a string’, a finding that has greatly accelerated the ability to find new pathways and chemistries of potential importance for the development of drugs and other useful compounds. Professor Osbourn has established a synthetic biology platform that provides rapid access to previously inaccessible natural products and analogs at gram scale. Together these two step changes open up new routes to combine genomics and synthetic biology to synthesize and access previously inaccessible natural products and analogs for medicinal, agricultural and industrial applications.
Professor Osbourn is committed to making science and scientific exchange accessible to all through innovating at the interface between science and the arts. She is the founder and director of the Science, Art and Writing (SAW) Trust, an international charity that promotes innovation in science communication. She is also a poet, and her prize-winning book of poetry ‘Mock Orange’ was published in September 2020 by SPM Publications.