A FABI visit to Hexagon Bio 2022-04-04
Professors Brenda Wingfield and Mike Wingfield had the opportunity to visit the facilities of Hexagon Bio situated in the Menlo Parks Labs campus south of San Francisco. Dr Joe Spraker who has spearheaded a research collaboration between FABI and Hexagon hosted the visit that included discussions on the methods that the company is using to screen fungi for natural products. They were able to discuss the technologies being used by Hexagon and to consider improved means to store fungi for future study. The approach to natural product discovery by Hexagon is well illustrated in the paper “Hex: A heterologous expression platform for the discovery of fungal natural products” (Harvey et al, 2018).