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 LSI's 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
The University of Michigan has asked all laboratories, not performing COVID-19 research, to ramp down operations to critical tasks only by Friday, March 20 at 5:00 pm. The goal is to minimize the number of people in the facility at any one time to reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19.
What this means for the NPDC and our collaborators – the NPDC will no longer be performing research activities until further notice. In the NPDC, we have identified two critical task only team members, our director and our lab manager. These individuals will have access to the NPDC to replace liquid nitrogen tanks and ensure the stability of experimental materials during this time.
We want to protect our lab members and the research they are doing to the best of our ability. As more information that is pertinent is made available to the NPDC, we will pass it along to you. We appreciate your understanding and support during this new time for all of us.
While our services that require in-lab work will be unavailable, we wanted to let you know that the following services will still be available:
· scientific staff are available for consultations and project planning
· bioinformatic work
· support letters
· project update/status/consultation
· manuscript/grant writing
· services for COVID-19 research (if any)
Please do not hesitate to reach out to Ashu Tripathi or Jenn Soules with any questions you may have.
Michigan Drug Discovery (MDD) is now accepting proposals for the next round of funding, up to $75,000. MDD Pilot Grants are an excellent way to fund your research in the NPDC and accelerate the drug discovery process. To begin the application process, click here to request a pre-submission meeting.
The application can be found here. The deadline to submit is April 20, 2020.
Our Services
More than 40,000 natural product extracts collected around the globe. Available for high-throughput screening in the U-M Center for Chemical Genomics.
Bioactive molecule identification using traditional bio-assay guided fractionation, as well as new data-guided discovery tools. Small-molecule structural characterization. Optimization for creating intellectual property.
Ability to do high-throughput molecular characterization of enzymatic products, and analysis using rapid separation technologies.
Biosynthetic cluster mining of microbial genomic DNA. Artificial-intelligence & machine learning-based genome-to-natural-product technologies.
Featured News
Inaugural Biosciences Initiative faculty hire
The University of Michigan Biosciences Initiative is proud to announce the onboarding of Roland Kersten, Ph.D., as its first expert faculty hire.
Biosciences Initiative invests $45M in U-M research
Three ground-breaking LSI projects are among the University of Michigan projects to be funded in the first round of investments from President Mark Schlissel’s Biosciences Initiative.