Rate My Professor Sacha Pidot

Associate Professor Sacha Pidot serves as Associate Professor in Bacteriology within the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne, part of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences and affiliated with the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity. He holds a BSc in Microbiology and PhD in Microbiology from Monash University, with his doctoral research investigating the pathogenesis of Mycobacterium ulcerans, the causative agent of Buruli ulcer. Following his PhD, Pidot was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship in 2011 and joined Professor Christian Hertweck's laboratory at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology in Germany. There, he studied natural product biosynthesis in anaerobic bacteria, resulting in the discovery of the antibiotic clostrubin, which received the Medac Prize in 2014 and 2015 and the Leibniz "Drug of the Year" award in 2016.

At the Doherty Institute, Pidot heads the Pidot Laboratory focused on antibiotic discovery and biosynthesis, primarily from Actinomycete bacteria and human pathogenic microbes. His research utilizes microbiology, molecular biology, genomics, and biological chemistry to identify new antimicrobials, including activating cryptic gene clusters, culturing uncultured microbes, and elucidating biosynthetic pathways through techniques such as DNA sequencing, bioinformatic analysis, antimicrobial assays, and natural product isolation. Pidot teaches Medical Microbiology: Bacteriology (MIIM30011) and has secured funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council and Australian Research Council. He received the 2025 Frank Fenner Award from the Australian Society for Microbiology. Key publications include "Reductive evolution and niche adaptation inferred from the genome of Mycobacterium ulcerans, the causative agent of Buruli ulcer" (2008), "Biosynthesis and Ether Bridge Formation in Nargenicin Macrolides" (2019, Angew Chem Int Ed Engl), "The Nargenicin Family of Oxa-Bridged Macrolide Antibiotics" (2020, Chemistry), "Discovery and Biosynthesis of the Cytotoxic Polyene Terpenomycin in Human Pathogenic Nocardia" (2023, ACS Chem Biol), "Widespread Family of NAD⁺-Dependent Sulfoquinovosidases at the Gateway to Sulfoquinovose Catabolism" (2023, J Am Chem Soc), and "MIBiG 4.0: advancing biosynthetic gene cluster curation through global collaboration" (2025, Nucleic Acids Res).