Speakers
Making vanillin the natural way- how plants do it
Richard A Dixon MA, DPhil, ScD, FRS
Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus,
University of North Texas,
Denton TX.
There is a clear desire for a sustainable supply of natural vanillin. One can argue the merits and “naturalness” of the various ways in which vanillin is currently produced commercially, but it seems reasonable that the most natural way to make vanillin is to do it exactly as the vanilla plant does. However, although vanillin is one of the structurally simplest of plant natural products, and there are multiple potential routes for its biosynthesis, there is still disagreement as to exactly how vanillin is made in V. planifolia. I will give a brief history of the previous studies on vanillin biosynthesis, comment on recent work purporting to demonstrate genetic engineering of vanillin using plant enzymes, and suggest approaches for resolving the different views on the origin of the most popular plant natural product.​
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Professor Richard Dixon received his Bachelors’ and Doctoral degrees in Biochemistry and Botany from the University of Oxford, UK, and postdoctoral training in Plant Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, UK. His research covers the biochemistry, molecular biology and metabolic engineering of plant natural product pathways and their implications for agriculture and the bioeconomy. He has published over 540 papers and chapters on these and related topics in international journals, which have been cited over 100,000 times. Professor Dixon is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, Member of the US National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists, and has been named by the Institute for Scientific Information as one of the 10 most cited authors in the plant and animal sciences. He has served as President of the American Society of Plant Biologists and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the world’s oldest scientific journal.