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SCI National Retrosynthesis Competition

A team of postgraduates from the Nelson group have recently been invited to the finals of National Retrosynthesis competition run by the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI).
The team, comprising of (L-R) Tom James, George Karageorgis, Mark Dow and Dr Paul MacLellan, fought off competition from both academic and industrial groups to earn a place in the finals where they will be challenged to provide a synthesis of Alsmaphorazine E, a recently discovered indole alkaloid.
They will be presenting their work at SCI house in London in February, competing against teams from institutions such as Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge, and numerous industrial teams, for this prestigious prize.
We wish them the best of luck.

Welcome

Welcome to the home page of Professor Adam Nelson's research group.  We are interested in synthetic organic chemistry and its application to biological problems.  Most of our work involves the development of new methods and strategies for controlling stereochemistry, and we apply these approaches to the synthesis of biologically active molecules and natural products.  Synthesis is an immensely powerful tool in Chemical Biology, which we exploit in the directed evolution of enzymes as tailored catalysts for synthetic chemistry, and in chemical genetics, where we discover and exploit new small molecular modulators of protein function.  Browse our research pages to find out more about what we do!

Our laboratories are superbly equipped for research at the interface between chemistry and biology.  We moved into newly refurbished laboratories in the School of Chemistry at Leeds in 2004, which provide 2m fume cupboards for each researcher.  We are located close to facilities for analytical and preparative HPLC, semi-preparative mass-directed HPLC, analytical LC-MS, IR, NMR (up to 500 MHz), automated synthesis and protein expression. 

Professor Nelson is Director of the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology, an identified University Centre of Excellence within the University of Leeds, and holds a EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship (2004-2009) to develop his research in Chemical Genetics.

Current and recent research has been funded by EPSRC, BBSRC, the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, the Royal Society, the Nuffield Foundation and industry (Aventis, Pfizer, Syngenta, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Avecia, F. Hoffmann-La Roche and Organon).  Professor Nelson was awarded the RSC Meldola medal (2001), a Pfizer Academic Award (2002), an AstraZeneca Research award in Organic Chemistry (2005) and an RSC Corday-Morgan medal (2007).