Natural Products Metabolomics Lab @ Sookmyung Women's University
Metabolomics-driven Natural Product Discovery
Natural products are the one of major sources of chemical diversity for drug discovery. In the history of evolution, the chemical diversity of natural products has been accumulated as a result of various species' adaptation to their environment. Thus, tracking the evolutionary history of chemical diversity in a systemic view provides us with many insights and possibilities for new chemical entity discovery. Recent advances in mass spectrometry (MS) allow us to acquire enormous data about the chemical diversity of natural products, and advances in MS-related bioinformatics tools convert the data into information. In our lab, we look into the chemical diversity of natural products made by plants and fungi systemically using mass spectrometry-based untargeted metabolomics, then use the analytical result as a guideline for further discovery of useful compounds.
Investigation of Microbial Chemical Interaction
Microbial natural products play an important role as a mediator of crosstalk between bacteria and fungi. Here we observe what kinds of chemicals are made by interacting fungi and bacteria using mass spectrometry, then try to find the detailed function of the metabolites. We believe that the ecological functions we find will give insights on potential uses of the microbial metabolites as pharmaceuticals.
