About Me

Erome is a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Kentucky (UK) College of Pharmacy. She is a member of the Van Lanen and Thorson research groups studying the biosynthesis of antimicrobial and antitumor natural products. Her research interests include chemical biology, protein engineering, biocatalysis bioorganic chemistry, and natural products. During her postdoc tenure she has worked as an Office of Technology and Commercialization (OTC) Fellow and served as a postdoc liaison to the Graduate Student Congress for the Society of Postdoctoral Scholars (SOPS) in which she now serves as president. She earned her PhD from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with professor Jiantao Guo where she received training in biochemistry, chemical biology and biocatalysis. She is also an astronomy enthusiast and enjoys reading, and music.

Research Experience

PhD, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Department of Chemistry

Developing peptide sensors for kinases with associated with metastasis in cancers.

Unnatural amino acid incorporation and quadruplet codon decoding.

Investigating the anti-cancer properties of an indium porphyrin compounds    

Biocatalysis with carboxylic acid reductases for biofuel production

Repurposing photoactive yellow protein (PYP) as a small molecule biosensor  

Postdoctoral Research Scholar, University of Kentucky, Pharmaceutical Sciences

Elucidating the biosynthesis of antibacterial and anti-cancer compounds

Understanding the enzymology of enediyne thioesterases

Publications

  • Bhardwaj, M., Cui, Z., Hankore, E.D., Moonschix, F.H., Esfahani, H.S., Phillips, G., Thorson, J.S., Shen, B., Van Lane, S.G. Polyketide origin of the dyine-containing carbocycle and anthraquinone of enediynes. PNAS. 2023, 120, e2220468120
  • Kramer, L.; Le, X.; Hankore, E. D.; Wilson, A. M.; Guo, J.; Niu, W. Engineering and Characterization of Hybrid Carboxylic Acid Reductases. Journal of Biotechnology2019, 304, 52-56. 
  • Hankore, E. D., Zhang, L., Chen, Y. Genetic incorporation of noncanonical amino acids using two mutually orthogonal quadruplet codons. ACS Synthetic Biology. 2019, 8, 1168-1174.
  • Kramer, L.*; Hankore, E. D.*; Liu, Y.; Liu, K.; Jimenez, E.; Guo, J.; Niu, W. “Characterization of Carboxylic Acid Reductases for Biocatalytic Synthesis of Industrial Chemicals.” ChemBioChem2018, 19, 1452-1460.  
  • Kelly, M. I., Betchel, T. J., R eddy, D. R., Hankore, E. D., Beck, J. R., Stains, C. I. “A Real-time, Fluorescence-based Assay for Rho-associated Protein Kinase Activity.” Analytica Chimica Acta, 2015891, 284-290. 

Service & Training

OTC Fellow

Working with the Office of Technology and Commercialization (OTC) to commercialize the inventions of University of Kentucky Researchers.

President of the Society of Postdoctoral Scholars (SOPS)

Leading SOPS and working alongside the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs to serve postdocs across the UK campus through planning professional and personal development events, including the 2022 annual day-long symposium for postdocs.

Teaching

Experience teaching introductory and organic chemistry labs, recitations, and training undergraduate and graduate research students.

Activities

Watch a recent interview I did with Rep. Charles Booker here. This civic engagement event was hosted by the Graduate Student Congress (GSC) at the University of Kentucky.

Watch my talk on Vaccine Research and Approval at the 2021 Bost Health Policy Forum.

The Society of Postdoctoral Scholars (SOPS) at UK recently hosted Professor Carl Bergstrom. You can watch his talk on Fighting the Misinfodemic here.

css.php