Michael Andrew Fischbach (born November 3, 1980) is an American chemist, microbiologist, and geneticist. He is an associate professor of Bioengineering and ChEM-H Faculty Fellow at Stanford University[1][2] and a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator.[3]
Education
Fischbach earned his A.B. in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard College in 2003. During that time (2000-2003), he worked in Jeffrey Settleman's lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center on the biochemistry of oncogenic mutants of the small GTPase Ras.[4] In 2007, he earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry and Chemical Biology from Harvard University, working in Christopher T. Walsh's laboratory at Harvard Medical School on iron acquisition in bacterial pathogens and the biochemistry of natural product biosynthesis.[5][6]
Career
Fischbach was a junior fellow in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital (2007-2009) before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco in 2009. He moved to Stanford University as an associate professor in September 2017. As a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, Fischbach is one of eight faculty members across Stanford, UCSF, and the University of California, Berkeley leading the CZ Biohub Microbiome Initiative, launched in 2018, with the goal of understanding how the microbiota can influence human health.[7]
Fischbach is currently a member of the scientific advisory board of NGM Biopharmaceuticals[8] and a co-founder of Revolution Medicines.[9]
Research
Fischbach's lab focuses on discovering and characterizing small molecules from microorganisms, with an emphasis on the human microbiome.[10][11]
Small molecules from the human microbiota
In 2014, Fischbach and his laboratory published a survey of biosynthetic genes in the human microbiome, describing the ability of human-associated microbes to produce thiopeptide antibiotics.[12][13][14][15] The Fischbach lab discovered that the gut commensal Bacteroides fragilis produces the immune modulatory sphingolipid alpha-galactosylceramide,[16] showed that the production of neurotransmitters is common among commensal gut bacteria,[17] and discovered the biosynthetic pathway for a common class of bile acids produced by gut bacteria.[18]
Computational approaches to natural product discovery
Fischbach's lab developed an algorithm, ClusterFinder, that automates the process of identifying biosynthetic genes for small molecules in bacterial genome sequences.[19][20] With Marnix Medema, he co-developed a second algorithm for identifying biosynthetic gene clusters, antiSMASH,[21] with which ClusterFinder has been merged.
Personal life
Fischbach is married to Elizabeth Sattely, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford.[22]
^Fischbach MA, Settleman J. Specific biochemical inactivation of oncogenic Ras proteins by nucleoside diphosphate kinase. Cancer Res. 2003 Jul 15;63(14):4089-94. PMID12874011.
^Fischbach MA, Lin H, Liu DR, Walsh CT. In vitro characterization of IroB, a pathogen-associated C-glycosyltransferase. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 Jan 18;102(3):571-6. Epub 2004 Dec 14. PMID15598734; PMC545562.
^Walsh CT, Fischbach MA. Natural products version 2.0: connecting genes to molecules. J Am Chem Soc. 2010 Mar 3;132(8):2469-93. doi:10.1021/ja909118a. PMID20121095; PMC2828520.
^Donia MS, Cimermancic P, Schulze CJ, Wieland Brown LC, Martin J, Mitreva M, Clardy J, Linington RG, Fischbach MA. A systematic analysis of biosynthetic gene clusters in the human microbiome reveals a common family of antibiotics. Cell. 2014 Sep 11;158(6):1402-14. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2014.08.032. PMID25215495; PMC4164201.
^Wieland Brown LC, Penaranda C, Kashyap PC, Williams BB, Clardy J, Kronenberg M, Sonnenburg JL, Comstock LE, Bluestone JA, Fischbach MA. Production of α-galactosylceramide by a prominent member of the human gut microbiota. PLoS Biol. 2013 Jul;11(7):e1001610. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001610. Epub 2013 Jul 16. PMID23874157; PMC3712910.
^Williams BB, Van Benschoten AH, Cimermancic P, Donia MS, Zimmermann M, Taketani M, Ishihara A, Kashyap PC, Fraser JS, Fischbach MA. Discovery and characterization of gut microbiota decarboxylases that can produce the neurotransmitter tryptamine. Cell Host Microbe. 2014 Oct 8;16(4):495-503. doi:10.1016/j.chom.2014.09.001. Epub 2014 Sep 25. PMID25263219; PMC4260654.
^Devlin AS, Fischbach MA. A biosynthetic pathway for a prominent class of microbiota-derived bile acids. Nat Chem Biol. 2015 Sep;11(9):685-90. doi:10.1038/nchembio.1864. Epub 2015 Jul 20. PMID26192599; PMC4543561.
^Cimermancic P, Medema MH, Claesen J, Kurita K, Wieland Brown LC, Mavrommatis K, Pati A, Godfrey PA, Koehrsen M, Clardy J, Birren BW, Takano E, Sali A, Linington RG, Fischbach MA. Insights into secondary metabolism from a global analysis of prokaryotic biosynthetic gene clusters. Cell. 2014 Jul 17;158(2):412-21. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2014.06.034. PMID25036635; PMC4123684.
