October
7,
2022
Leverage a Large Actinobacterial Strain Collection for Natural Products and Drug Discovery
The Natural Products Discovery Center (NPDC) at UF Scripps Biomedical Research houses one of the world’s largest actinobacterial strain collections, totaling ~125,000 strains. These strains, isolated over the last eight decades and from 69 different countries, encode natural product chemical and biological diversity that are impossible to reproduce in laboratory settings today. We have launched a large-scale genome sequencing campaign to establish the Natural Products Genomics Resource Center (NPGRC) at NPDC. The sequenced genomes will be used to create the NPGRC database, which, together with the strains, will be made available to the scientific community to enable natural product studies and drug discovery.
Hosted by Tim Bugni
Ben Shen received his BSc from Hangzhou University, MS from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, PhD from Oregon State University, and carried out postdoctoral research at University of Wisconsin-Madison (under the late Prof. C. Richard Hutchinson). Ben served on the faculty at the University of California, Davis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, The Scripps Research Institute, and currently is a Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Molecular Medicine and serves as Director of Natural Products Discovery Center at UF Scripps Biomedical Research. Research in the Shen Lab centers on chemistry, biochemistry, and genetics of natural product biosynthesis and mining of actinobacterial genomes for natural products and drug discovery.
