Roland Kersten Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD 9500 Gilman Drive, Mail Code 0204 La Jolla, CA 92093-0204 Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Departments of Pharmacology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, UCSD 9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0636 La Jolla, CA 92093-0636 email: rdkerste@ucsd.edu Phone: (858) 822 - 0412

Bio

Roland, born in Berlin, Germany, in 1985, obtained his Diploma in 2008 in biochemistry from the Free University Berlin, Germany. The final 9 months of his Diploma thesis, on the characterization of orphan gene clusters from the marine organism Salinipora tropica, were supervised by Dr. Dorrestein at the University of California, San Diego.  Following the completion of his Diploma, Roland continued to answer natural product biosynthetic questions by modern mass spectrometry. Roland is currently working in the Dorrestein Lab as a research associate. Since fall of 2009, he is a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego under dual mentorship of Dr. Bradley Moore and Dr. Pieter C. Dorrestein. His research is focused on implementing mass spectrometry as a genome mining tool for natural product discovery.

Publications

Kersten, R. D., Yang, Y. L., Xu, Y., Cimermancic, P., Nam, S. J., Fenical, W., Fischbach, M. A., Moore, B. S., Dorrestein, P. C. A mass spectrometry-guided genome mining approach for natural product peptidogenomics. Nat. Chem. Biol. 7, 794-802 (2011).

Liu, W.-T., Kersten, R. D., Yang, Y. L., Moore, B. S., Dorrestein, P. C. Imaging Mass Spectrometry and Genome Mining via Short Sequence Tagging Identified the Anti-Infective Agent Arylomycin in Streptomyces roseosporus. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 133, 18010-18013 (2011).

Yang, Y. L., Xu, Y., Kersten, R. D., Liu, W.-T., Meehan, M. J., Moore, B. S., Bandeira, N., Dorrestein, P. C. Connecting chemotypes and phenotypes of cultured marine microbial assemblages by imaging mass spectrometry. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 50, 5839-5842 (2011).

Meier, J. L., Patel, A. D., Niessen, S., Meehan, M., Kersten, R., Yang, J. Y., Rothmann, M., Cravatt, B. F., Dorrestein, P. C., Burkart, M. D., Bafna, V. Practical 4'-phosphopantetheine active site discovery from proteomic samples. J. Proteome Res. 10, 320-329 (2011).

Kersten, R. D., Dorrestein, P. C. Metalloenzymes: Natural product nitrosation. Nat. Chem. Biol. 6, 636-637 (2010).

Kersten, R. D., Meehan, M. J., Dorrestein, P. C. Applications of Modern Mass Spectrometry Techniques in Natural Products Chemistry. in Comprehensive Natural Products, 2nd edn., Vol. 9 (Ed. Mander, L., Liu, H.-W.), 389-456 (Elsevier, 2010).

Kersten, R. D., Dorrestein, P. C. Secondary metabolomics: natural products mass spectrometry goes global. ACS Chem. Biol. 4, 599-601 (2009).

Selected presentations

Kersten, R. D., Moore, B. S., Dorrestein, P. C. ”Natural product peptidogenomics (NPP): A mass spectrometry-guided genome mining approach.” Oral presentation, American Society of Pharmacognosy annual meeting, San Diego, CA, Aug 2011.

Awards

2005-2008	Undergraduate fellowship of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
11/2008 - 09/2008	U.S.-Research scholarship of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes