C) Build a marine natural product library

Natural products are one of the main sources of human medicine. Currently, there are approximately 200,000 identified natural products. Continued success in identifying new natural products, especially ones with either new structural scaffolds and biologically significant activities, is more and more challenging.  The Liu laboratory adopts three approaches to address this issue:

1. Our first approach is to mine organisms from previously unsampled environments.  The Liu laboratory focuses on isolating natural products from marine micro-organisms (isoprenoids, alkanoids, halides, and phosphonates).
2. Our second approach is to develop new methods to isolate metabolites that are either low in natural abundance or unstable to tradition extraction procedures.
3. The third approach is to identify elicitors to activate cryptic biosynthetic pathway because the majority of biosynthetic machinery encoded in micro-organism genomes are not expressed under current laboratory culture conditions.