Roughly half of the drugs in clinical use today started as natural products — molecules that evolved inside microorganisms and plants that form the backbone of antibiotics, anti-cancer agents and other medicines.

Over the past decade, the University of Michigan has become a leader in natural product sciences. 

The U-M Natural Products Discovery Core has developed a 40,000-sample (and growing) library of natural product extracts derived from a unique collection of diverse marine and terrestrial actinomycetes, fungi and cyanobacteria. The core provides researchers at U-M and external partners with the technology and expertise to develop candidates identified through high-throughput screening into unique, bioactive, patentable, small molecules.

Rapid genomic and metabolomic profiling allows users identify high value molecules as probes and drug leads.

Recent investments by the U-M Biosciences Initiative will add state-of-the art mass spectrometry and NMR resources for structure elucidation, as well as the recruitment of new faculty and specialists.

Announcements

December 6, 2018

Pardon our dust! We're excited to be working on the web pages for the newest LSI core laboratory.