Nora Liu

Recent advances in bioinformatics, synthetic biology, and analytical chemistry have enabled the genome mining of ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs), which have a variety of bioactivities and are promising drug candidates. Hybrid RiPP biosynthetic gene clusters that combine multiple natural product families have been discovered, resulting in products with blended structural characteristics. Hybrid RiPPs are a new type of natural product that blends features of RiPPs and other natural product families. My current research is focused on identifying novel hybrid RiPP BGCs through bioinformatics and characterizing hybrid RiPPs.