Chemical Engineering Seminar

Natural products are important small molecules widely used as drugs, pesticides, herbicides, and biological probes. These compounds offer functional group arrays and scaffold architectures that form advanced platforms for optimization of biological activities. The unique functional groups, additionally, may be used as chemical reporters in bioorthogonal chemical reactions to enable the visualization, engineered biosynthesis and mode of action study of natural products. Some of our recent research themes include understanding and engineering the biosynthesis of complex natural products with important pharmaceutical activities, discovery and functional study of new bioactive natural products, and developing new research toolkit to advance natural product research. For example, we recently identified and characterized novel biosynthetic pathways in microbes leading to the generation of bioorthogonal chemical entities that are commonly used in chemical synthesis and bioorthogonal chemistry. We further showed the promise of using these enzymatic machinery for in situ generation and incorporation of a unique chemical tag into various natural product scaffolds. Coupling with diverse bioorthogonal probes, our work may significantly advance the field of natural product research and allow greater utilization of the largely untapped potential of natural products for both pharmaceutical and bio-based chemical applications.