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 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
The NPDC is hiring! We are seeking a postdoctoral fellow to conduct analytical research related to natural products isolation and quantification of samples identified in high-throughput screening assays, and to apply modern data informatics-based approaches to diversify the natural products library at the LSI.
NPDC is now LIVE on MiCORES using iLabs!
MiCORES is an online core management system from Agilent Technologies and iLab Solutions. It is designed to streamline the process of requesting and billing for core services. All NPDC users are encouraged to use this new system.
Registration for the system is necessary using your UMich ID. The link to register is below:
Once you have registered, you will be able to request services for your particular project needs. If you would like step-by-step information, please contact Jenn Soules (jlsoules@umich.edu).
While contacting us through iLabs is preferred, you can still reach out to us directly for your project needs.
Michigan Drug Discovery has awarded funding which will continue utilization of the NPDC. James Moon, John Gideon Searle Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the College of Pharmacy, will continue his ongoing work to develop immunotherapy agents for the treatment of cancer. Over the past year, during the screening process of over 10,000 natural product extracts in the NPDC, several were identified with potent immune-stimulating activity. Moon’s new funding will provide support for further in-depth research of the most interesting extracts, including structural characterization of the active component natural products, as well as scale up for additional research and development.
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.