Nature has evolved the capacity to carry out many challenging chemical transformations of great interest to synthetic chemistry if they could be repurposed for targeted synthesis. However, our ability to construct de novo pathways for the cellular production of small molecule targets is still largely limited by 1) our knowledge gap for rationally manipulating enzyme activities and 2) the small scope of existing biocatalytic reactions compared with those used in synthetic chemistry.

Genome sequencing has revealed a vast repertoire of enzymes hidden in nature, suggesting that there is still a great potential to expand the repertoire of enzymatic transformations. Our group is interested in discovering and understanding new biosynthetic enzymes, and harnessing their activities to design and build artificial biosynthetic pathways for the production of pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and biomaterials in living cells