报告人：Dr. Xiaozhou Luo  (UC Berkeley)

时间：4月10日 10:30-11:30AM

报告地点：A205

Abstract: Natural products have long been a valuable source for small molecular therapeutics, but they usually present in low abundance in their natural sources and their chemical structures are complicated, making it difficult and cost inefficient for extraction or synthesis. Heterologous biosynthesis of complex natural products has become an attractive method because of their low cost and stable supply. We have established a few different methods for the heterologous biosynthesis of various natural products, including antibiotic and anti-cancer drug, in bacteria and yeast. More importantly, we have engineered the enzymes in the pathways through rational design or directed evolution/selection to enable the production of natural products analogues, which significantly expand the chemical space for current natural products. We have also developed automation system to assistant enzyme evolution and strain construction, which will facilitate the discovery of natural products or their analogues with diverse structures, target selectivity, and pharmacokinetic profiles.

Biography: Dr. Xiaozhou Luo is a postdoc fellow in the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences at University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.S in Chemistry and Biological Chemistry from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, focusing on total synthesis and medicinal chemistry. He received his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Peter Schultz at The Scripps Research Institute, USA, working on the biosynthesis of small and macro-molecular therapeutics. After graduation, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and is working on the biosynthesis of natural products and their analogues. Dr. Luo’s current research focuses on pathway engineering and enzyme evolution, with the emphasis on developing novel synthetic biology methods and high-throughput automation. He has co-authored >20 scientific papers in journals including Nature Chemical Biology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, Angewandte Chemie, etc. He has delivered many presentations in conferences and research institutions. He also served as the editorial board member of BMC Biotechnology. 

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