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Professor J. Bryan Jones

University Professor Emeritus - Biological, Organic Chemistry

Department of Chemistry
University of Toronto
80 St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario
Canada, M5S 3H6

Office: Lash Miller Laboratories, Room 603
Phone: (416) 978-3589, (705) 652-0542

Research Interests

My research lab is now closed and I am no longer taking on graduate students or postdoctoral fellows. However, my interest continues in enzymes as catalysts for asymmetric synthesis, and in bioorganic chemistry and biotechnology.

I continue to maintain my electronic database on the practical uses of biocatalysts. This is a comprehensive (from 1905 onwards) and up-to-date, fully structure and keyword searchable, database that contains over 51,000 reactions from the literature and patents, together with enzyme sources, yields, purities, % ees, etc. for all transformations, where available. It is published, and distributed by Accelrys Inc. as "BioCatalysis" and is one of their flagship databases. See http://accelrys.com/products/accord/chemical-databases/biocatalysis.html

Also, I am currently putting together an archive of the history of the Chemistry Department, from its establishment in 1843 to the present. This will include key historical landmarks, together with a comprehensive catalogue of teaching materials and equipment used in the Department over the past 150 years. I have already assembled a significant collection of equipment, all of which will eventually be available to qualified researchers in the History of Science, The earliest pieces to date are copies of the University of Toronto Honours Chemistry examinations for 1858 and a Becker.s Sons (Rotterdam) balance made in ~1890. The electronic version of the collection will accessible from the Chemistry home page and will document the progress of all aspects of the Department's chemistry over the years. A physical exhibit of a representative selection of papers and equipment is also planned for the Lobby, so that students and visitors may view, on a daily basis, the Department.s rich heritage, on which our current status as one of the world.s most outstanding Chemistry Departments was built. In addition, the web version will include video interviews with the many current faculty members whose research has solved key problems, or has changed the course of chemistry.s development. These anecdotal videos of the inventors of our pioneering "firsts" telling their stories of how their cutting edge advancements came about will give students and the public a permanent, personal, human, connection with the momentus advances our professors and their students have made, and the challenges and obstacles that were overcome.

Since we pioneered the use of enzymes as practical catalysts for asymmetric synthesis in the mid-1970s, our research progressed into several other new frontier areas. Our latest advances exploited a new strategy for the generation of new specificities or activities of enzymes by controlled chemical modifications of their mutants created at preselected positions by site-directed mutagenesis. We adopted this combined site-directed mutagenesis-chemical modification strategy since it offers virtually unlimited possibilities for creating new structural environments at any enzyme location. The results have been dramatic, as documented in the Recent Publications link below. Most excitingly, the approach opens up a totally new therapeutic strategy for an alternative, previously unexploited, enzymatic approach to selectively target and destroy proteins involved in diseases. Most recently, novel carbohydrate aspects of this approach have been spectacularly extended at Oxford by a former postdoctoral fellow, Professor Ben Davis.

Recent Publications

Useful links and Resources

U of T Department of Chemistry Home Page

Last updated August 12, 2009 by Bryan Jones