Research Expertise and Interest

chemical biology, microbiology, natural product biosynthesis, enzyme discovery and characterization, drug discovery

Research Description

Wenjun Zhang is the Charles R. Wilke Endowed Chair in Chemical Engineering and a professor in the College of Chemistry. Her lab is interested in biomolecular engineering for applications in bioenergy and medicine. Their research themes include genome mining for new bioactive small molecule and enzyme discovery, understanding the intriguing enzymology and programming rules underlying natural product biosynthesis, designing pathways toward combinatorial natural product biosynthesis, probing the activity and/or function of natural products, and developing new research toolkits to promote the aforementioned research. Their approach combines principles in microbiology, molecular biology, biochemistry, chemical biology, protein engineering, and metabolic engineering.