Nora Liu

Natural products (NPs) are small organic molecules derived from secondary metabolism of living organisms. NPs have a proven track record of success in the history of drug discovery and development, and they continue to play a significant role. My project leverages (1) self-resistance gene guided genome mining, (2) Cas12a-assisted precise targeted cloning using in vivo Cre-lox recombination (CAPTURE), and (3) chassis-independent recombinase-assisted genome engineering (CRAGE), aiming to address the shortcomings of existed NP discovery methods in target bioactivity, large BGC cloning, and heterologous expression. The goal is to discover previously uncharacterized natural products with bioactivities, and potentially decipher novel mechanism of natural product biosynthesis.