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Senior Research Officer
Adjunct Professor, Biochemistry, University of Saskatchewan
B.Sc. University of Waterloo, 1982
M.Sc. University of Waterloo, 1984
Ph.D. University of Essex, 1987
Fax 306.975.4839
Email Patrick.Covello@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
Web bioinfo.pbi.nrc.ca/covello
Dr. Covello is curious about plants as organic chemists. How do plants make such a variety of natural products, some of which are quite difficult for human chemists to make? This leads to investigations of biochemical pathways, specialized structures, the enzymes involved, the genes encoding the enzymes and the regulation of all of the above. The current focus is on the isolation of gene encoding enzymes in natural product pathways of commercial interest. Heavy use is made of expressed sequence tag (EST) analysis combined with methods of functional genomics. Targets of particular interest are the antimalarial compound artemisinin, saponins, tropane alkaloids, and fatty acids. One of the recent highlights is the discovery of a gene encoding a cytochrome P450 involved in the biosynthesis of artemisinin.
