Christophe is a joint Associate Professor between the School of Life Sciences and the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick, UK. His research group is particularly interested in microbial natural products.
Christophe received his education in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Nice in France. He then carried out work on antibiotic biosynthesis for which he was awarded a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Exeter, UK. He then moved to Warwick in 2004 to work as a postdoctoral research fellow in Prof. Greg Challis group.
In 2010 Christophe was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to unlock the production of novel microbial antibiotics and to start his independent research group.
Over the last 5 years Christophe’s research on the detailed molecular mechanisms that control the production of specialised metabolites in Streptomyces has resulted in new approaches for antibiotic discovery. In particular, rational genetic manipulations of silent biosynthetic pathways have been found to trigger the production of novel natural products. Such approach, exemplified in a publication in the journal Chemical Science (2014, 5, 86), is expected to lead to the discovery of a wide variety of new metabolites, in particular new antibiotics.
