Opportunities forMerging Chemicaland BiologicalSynthesis”

Natural products and their derivatives have long been used as medicinal agents, and they still make up a significant fraction of clinically approved drugs. Natural product synthesis provides a rich and unparalleled opportunity to develop new synthetic transformations, conceive novel and general strategies to access complex structures and study the mechanism of action of bioactive targets. This lecture will illustrate the opportunities at this interface between synthetic organic chemistry and chemical biology by describing a series of examples we are actively working on in our laboratory at Peking University. We take inspiration from Mother Nature to study the biosynthesis of plant-derived natural products to elucidate new enzymatic mechanisms and apply the chemoenzymatic approach to prepare complex natural products and their derivatives. Moreover, we further use bioactive natural products to explore new biology and develop novel drug candidates for human diseases.



Prof. Xiaoguang Lei obtained BS in chemistry from Peking University in 2001 and a Ph.D. in organic synthesis from Boston University under the supervision of Prof. John Porco in 2006. Then he conducted postdoc work in bioorganic chemistry with Prof. Samuel Danishefsky at Columbia University from 2006 to 2008. In early 2009, he returned to China. He started his independent career as a Principal Investigator and Director of the Chemistry Center at the National Institute of Biological Sciences (NIBS) in Beijing.