Mo Lab Postdoc John Ganley wins NIH K99 grant

John “Jack” Ganley, a postdoctoral fellow with the Mo Lab, has been awarded a major, five-year “Pathway to Independence” grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for research on chemical communications between bacteria and algae/plants that could lead to the discovery of new drug therapies.

The NIH K99 award covers up to two years of postdoc work on substantive, mentored research and three years of independent research upon transition to a tenure-track faculty position. In total, the award provides up to five years of NIH research support at just under $1M.

Ganley earned the grant for his proposal Leveraging Ecological Interactions to Unearth Cryptic Metabolites and Regulatory Pathways from Algal and Plant Microbiomes. The award was announced earlier this month.

“I was really excited. It was a very long and rigorous review process,” said Ganley, now in his fourth year with the Mo Lab. “Getting the response was pretty exhilarating, especially as I prepare to transition to my independent career. But also natural product research is somewhat niche, so to have this huge institution recognize its importance to science is pretty gratifying.

“Every major discovery is built off of basic discoveries that happened over the past 150 years, or even longer,” said Ganley. “To get to things like CRISPR, we needed the scientist who was curious about these weird repeats they saw in a genome and asked, ‘I wonder what that is?’ That’s obviously an anecdotal example, but I want to be one of those people looking at these really basic things that could end up being translational.”

The NIH Pathway to Independence Award is designed to help outstanding postdoctoral researchers complete mentored training and then transition in a timely manner to independent research careers.

“I am very happy for Jack,” said Professor of Chemistry Mohammad Seyedsayamdost. “This award reflects both the depth of his scholarship and the remarkable leadership and mentorship he provides to our lab and the department. It is richly deserved.”

Broadly stated, Ganley’s research investigates the “cross-kingdom” relationships between bacteria and the algae/plant kingdoms to uncover potential drug therapies, including antibiotics. Scientists have long known that microbes in the soil use chemical signals to repel and invite other bacteria. This work forms the basis for many of our modern antibiotics. But the microbiomes in ocean algae and plants are not as well understood, and could spur a whole new realm of opportunity for uncovering hidden metabolites.

However, bacteria hosted by ocean algae and plants don’t always produce the same metabolites in the lab that they do in their natural settings. So it is crucial to access those small molecules in the lab, solve their structures, and scale them up for medicinal use.

“These organisms have evolved in the wild for millions of years to produce metabolites that have some sort of potent activity, and oftentimes that translates for us, right?. So if bacteria produce a molecule to kill other bacteria, we can use that as an antibiotic,” said Ganley.

“Our idea is that if we can mimic the ecology or the niche that these bacteria are found in, then maybe we can turn on those genes that end up producing those molecules. So we have about 40 algal metabolites. We test them one by one against bacteria that are associated with algae. Hopefully we’re mimicking the native environment that would cause them to turn on genes typically not turned on in a lab-based setting.

“The end goal is to find new metabolites that have intriguing bioactivity,” Ganley explained.

Ganley, who grew up in Syracuse, New York, earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He received his doctorate in chemistry from Duke University where he was mentored by Emily Derbyshire.

He won a 2022 Simons Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in Marine Microbial Ecology.