Research Interests
Plant natural products are significant sources of drugs and leads. Contents of metabolites of interest in plants are often low, and these compounds often possess extremely complex structures, making them difficult to be chemically synthesized. Hence, the availability of quantities of pure compounds poses serious challenges to drug development from plant natural products. The research group led by Zi Jiachen is interested in biosynthesis of plant pharmaceutical natural products (particularly terpenoids) and microbial production of these compounds and their analogues by metabolic engineering and combinatorial biosynthesis. They use synthetic biology approaches in combination with CRISPR-Cas9 to globally screen rate-limiting enzymes in the target pathways and adopt multi-omics techniques to clarify unknown metabolic regulation logics. Based on this knowledge, they design more rational metabolic circuits. They have recently constructed de novo biosynthetic approaches of sandalwood oils, silybins and isosilybins for the first time, and deciphered catalytic mechanism of germacrene synthase-like enzymes.
