Xinyu Liu

Total and Combinatorial (Bio)Synthesis of Natural Product, Novel Synthetic Method and Platform Development, Carbohydrate Chemistry, Glycobiology, Drug Discovery, Biomaterial, Synthetic Biology

We are a research group that consists of a mixture of synthetic chemists, natural product isolation specialists, biochemists and microbiologists.  We are interested in the discovery and functional study of broadly defined natural products using synthetic chemical, biological and genomics-guided approaches. The natural products of our current focus belong to the famly of oligosaccharids and small molecular secondary metabolites of microbial origins that exhibit broad functional roles in mamalian am=nd microbial physiology. These molecules serve as the catalyst to drive the discovery cycle between chemistry, biology and medicine in our laboratory. Projects that we are actively pursuing in the lab include: 1) synthetis carbohydrate chemistry concerns new synthetic methods development and total synthesis of biologically relevant oligosaccharides, 2) study of functional significanceof glycosylation in bacterial infection and cancer pathogenesis, 3) genomics-guided discovery of natural products, particularly thos with antibiotic activities and thos e with functional roles in bacterial physiology, 4) novel enzymatic transformations associated with complex natural product biosynthesis.