Sang LAb

Welcome
the laboratory for functional foods and human health

Dr. Sang’s laboratory studies food as medicine, with the overarching goal of using precision nutrition-based dietary regimens to combat and prevent chronic diseases. His research focuses on two main areas. First, his lab identifies bioactive components in functional foods and herbal medicines, such as ginger, tea, apple, blueberry, soy, whole grain wheat, oat, barley, and sorghum. They investigate these components' bioavailability, biotransformation, and potential preventive effects on gut health and metabolic diseases using in vitro and in vivo models. His lab has identified carbonyl stress as a new target for dietary flavonoids in chronic disease prevention. Second, his lab employs targeted and untargeted metabolomic approaches to study dietary and disease biomarkers, including utilizing flavonoids and novel metabolites as biomarkers for fruits, vegetables, and tea, as well as unique phytochemicals and their metabolites as biomarkers for whole grains.

Their microbiome research focuses on using the fecal metabolome as indicators of an individual’s dietary and health status. Key areas of focus include: 1) utilizing a precision nutrition approach to identify unique microbial metabolites of dietary compounds as exposure biomarkers for specific foods and to reflect inter-individual variations (metabotypes); 2) identifying novel bioactive microbial metabolites, such as metabolites of bilirubin and amino acid-conjugated short-chain fatty acids, and the bacteria that produce them, which are associated with chronic diseases, with the goal of establishing them as disease biomarkers; and 3) building an in-house library of microbial metabolites and using both targeted and untargeted metabolomic approaches to study the fecal metabolome.