# Chemical Biology
We focused on the discovery of Baltic microbial natural products
Our primary interest concerns the Baltic microbial natural products that are relevant to human health, this includes a fundamental understanding of their structures, biosynthesis, and biological activities. To further drive the research, we are closely collaborating with an Italian biotech company, NAICONS (Link).
1) Hunting for bioactive natural products
To discover microbial natural products that are relevant to human health which hidden in Baltic region, we uses microbial ecology (symbiotic relationship) reason and high throughput screening methods.
2) Connecting chemistry back to genes
To elucidate the biosynthetic pathway of natural products would allow us to better understanding how Nature make these molecules. To this end, we uses cloning, transformation and heterologous expression in Escherichia coli and potentially other heterologous host.
3) Evolution-inspired exploration
To genome mining the natural products, we uses bioinformatic tools such as sequence similarity networks and phylogenetic trees to construct, visualize and analyze the protein sequence. The resulting product from protein expression is characterized by the LC-MS and NMR structure elucidation.
4) Enzymology
We uses in vitro biochemical, AlphaFold modeling and mutational approaches to study/alter enzymatic reaction and elucidate the underlying mechanism.
# Story : Fork in the road
We made choices in our life -- hoping to make the right choice. But my case was like "wandering around and bump into a tree".
In my younger days, I was a gamer and top in my region. Without giving much thought about my undergraduate study, I took a programme and realized it isn’t fun for me. During my second year, out of curiosity -- I took an elective course far differed from the core degree program. It turned out that I had accidentally found a study I want to pursue as a career. This elective is Natural Products Chemistry -- mainly focus on discovering new chemical molecules from nature. The last stage of this study involved solving the chemical structure, which is like solving a puzzle cube.
After completed my PhD, an unexpected conference participation resulted a rare encounter that has brought me to oversea -- Australia, Japan and Singapore. Later, I realized how important my oversea experiences have added new features to my research direction, which opened the door for my next journey to Europe.
In short, I did not design my career path -- I simply following my interests. I believe there is an element of randomness in life -- sometimes wrong decisions can be a positive one -- so don't let happy accidents go to waste.