Peter Anderson

Biography

Dr. Anderson completed doctoral studies at the University of New England, New South Wales in 2001. His doctoral research was on the accumulation of a trace metal, cobalt, as well as vitamin B12 synthesis in the obligate anaerobic bacterium, Selenomonas ruminantium. In 2001, he took up a postdoctoral research position at the University of Utah with John Roth's genetics lab. About a year later, the entire lab moved to the University of California, Davis. In John Roth's lab, Dr. Anderson learned to use bacterial genetic techniques to determine the final steps involved in the synthesis of vitamin B12 cofactors in Salmonella, a model organism for B12 synthesis. As it turned out, Salmonella was making pseudovitamin B12 rather than vitamin B12. With some help from Prof. Bernhard Kräutler at the University of Innsbruk, who gifted a tiny amount of otherwise unobtainable pure pseudovitamin B12, it was possible to show that this bacterial cofactor was biologically relevant in the ethanoloamine ammonia lyase and methionine synthase reactions as well as being able to characterise the compounds made by thirty or so Salmonella B12 point mutants. A spin-off from this research was that it allowed the synthesis of carbon-14 vitamin B12 and, therefore, the use of carbon dating techniques that are sensitive enough to follow the vitamin's complicated uptake in human.

Research Interest

Biomedical science