Ding Lab
Principal Investigator: Yousong Ding
Institution: University of Florida (Gainesville, FL)
Primary Subfield: Synthetic Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary/Abstract Natural products (NPs) form a validated and preeminent source of new drug leads, but the low rate of new discoveries and the limited access to bioactive compounds are challenging current NPs-based drug discovery and development. Over the past decades, genome mining has become an important way for NP discovery. This transformative research strategy combines functional genomics and bioinformatics to associate biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) with potential chemical entities. The success of this strategy is supported by increasing and rapid access to (meta)genomic data, from which diverse rule-based and -free bioinformatics tools enable depicting the BGCs of different compound families and even assessing their novelty and potential bioactivity. However, a fundamental challenge faced by genome mining research is how to produce sufficient amounts of novel, bioactive NPs from mined BGCs. The overall goal of the PI's research program is to access and expand the therapeutically relevant chemical diversity of microbes directly from their genomes. The central hypothesis of this work is that microbial genomes can be exploited to produce bioactive NPs and analogs thro…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R35GM128742-09: Accessing and expanding microbial bioactive chemical diversity by synthetic biology and new enzymology (2026)
- 5R35GM128742-08: Accessing and expanding microbial bioactive chemical diversity by synthetic biology and new enzymology (2025)
- 5R35GM128742-07: Accessing and expanding microbial bioactive chemical diversity by synthetic biology and new enzymology (2024)
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