Sarah E. O'Connor

New Capabilities

Senior author of the Nature paper

For over two centuries, scientists knew that the bark of tropical cinchona trees could cure malaria, but not how the trees actually built the molecule responsible — quinine. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology have now mapped every enzymatic step in that construction, discovering a previously unknown intermediate compound and a surprise catalytic trick that nature uses to assemble quinine's distinctive molecular scaffold. They published the complete biosynthetic pathway in Nature on March 18, 2026.

Updated Mar 19