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 45,000-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 to 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
NPDC would like to congratulate the University of Michigan, Class of 2021 graduates Catherine (Cate) Hay and Linwei Yang. It’s been a pleasure having Linwei and Cate in the NPDC! Both worked very hard, were eager to learn, and took great care with the research they performed.
Linwei will be attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Ph.D. candidate in Chemistry. He plans to focus on “using synthetic biology to advance antibiotics discovery” in his future research.
Cate will be attending the University of Edinburgh working on her master’s degree next year. Her plans include working in a stem cell laboratory in the future and applying to NASA.
Linwei and Cate will be missed but we wish them well and great continued success!
Congratulations to Ralph "Jake" Harte for being selected to the 2021 Rosen Fellows program. Jake will be continuing with the NPDC this summer working on a variety of research projects.
Welcome to Fei Yang, our new Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Fei joins us from Wayne State University where he earned his Ph.D. and continued his research until we were able to welcome him to the NPDC. Please join us in welcoming Fei to the team!
Our Services
More than 45,000 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.