Research

中央研究院 生物化學研究所

林曉青實驗室 Hsiao-Ching Lin's Lab

天然物生物合成實驗室

Natural products (NPs) have been an important source of molecules in drug discovery and development. Their diversity scaffolds and semisynthetic derivatives provide new chemical entities (NCEs) and exhibit variety of biological activities with pharmacological potentials. Recent advances in molecular biology, bioinformatics and whole-genome sequencing provided great advances in understanding the genetic and enzymatic basis of natural product biosynthesis.

Our research consists of the following topics. Each of these topics can be standalone but is at the same time interconnected with each other.

(A) Discovery of bioactive natural products based on activity-guided screening.

(B) Targeted gene cluster discovery and biosynthetic study of bioactive NPs.

(C) Discovery of new NPs by genome mining in microorganisms.

(D) Combinatorial biosynthesis in heterologous expression systems.

天然物(Natural products, NPs)在藥物開發與發展的過程中，對於藥物來源扮演著重要的角色，天然物的結構多樣性及其半合成衍生物提供了新化學物質(new chemical entities, NCEs)，並具有不同生物活性及藥理潛力。近年來，隨著分子生物、生物資訊和基因體定序科技的進步，對於以基因和蛋白質層面研究天然物的生合成，具有重大的發展及應用。

我們實驗室的研究方向可分為下列幾項，各項可為獨立研究題材或互為相輔方向：

1) 新穎活性天然物的分離與鑑定−以活性測試為導向

2) 活性天然物生物合成研究，其中包括瞭解基因、酵素功能以及催化機轉

3) 利用基因採礦，探索”沉默”基因簇編碼的活性化合物

4) 以異源性表達進行組合式生物合成