报告题目：Natural products: identification, characterization and production throughsynthetic biology

报 告 人：刘平华教授

   报告人单位：Department of Chemistry, Boston Univeristy, Boston, MA

报告时间：2016年12月6日（周二），9:00-10:00

报告地点：18号实验楼315室

主 持 人：张立新 研究员

主办单位：生物反应器工程国家重点实验室

报告人简介

刘平华教授

Professor, Department of Chemistry, Boston University, Boston, MA

The Liu Group’s research is at the interface of Chemistry and Biology. Their work focuses on：

(a)Mechanistic studies and the application of pharmacologically important natural products using organic, molecular biology as well as biophysical methods.

(b)The chemical basis of biological clock with the ultimate goal of elucidating the time-recording mechanism in the ageing process. Their work’s main focuses are the chemical basis of pathogen and host interactions, and the chemical nature of the biological clock.

His projects address two major areas:

(1)Mechanistic studies of two metallo-proteins (IspG and IspH) in the corresponding process;

(2)Identification of other components in these two processes.

The techniques &resources in Liu’s Lab are summarized as below:

Enzymology:This includes organic synthesis, synthesis of isotopically labeled probes, sub-cloning, protein expression and purification, steady-state and pre-steady state kinetics, inhibitor design and evaluation, and mechanistic studies.

Genetics:The Liu lab uses transcriptional, post-transcriptional, and post-translational regulation, gene knockout, gene replacement, and metabolic engineering.

Spectroscopies: EPR and Mössbauer for metallo-enzyme characterizations areutilized inthe lab.

报告摘要

Natural products are one of the key sources of human medicine. In the last few decades, ~50% of newly approved drugs are natural products or natural product derived. With the exponentially growth of publiclyaccessible genome sequence information, it inevitably changes the natural product study practice.

In this presentation, using some key examples, we will highlight some key questions that my lab and my collaborators are addressing in this new and exciting era of natural product studies:

1.Developing affinity-based purification to selectively isolate low natural abundance natural products.

2.Mechanistically characterize novel transformations and bioinformatic based genome mining to identify new natural products.

3.Developing fermentation based production for commercially useful natural products.