Prof. Tiangang LIU, from the School of Pharmacy of Wuhan University, delivered a seminar on "Intelligent Manufacturing of Natural Products and Innovative Discovery" at the Truth-seeking (also known as “Qiu-Zhen”) forum on April 2. A total of 66 faculties and students from the School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology (SLSB), the Shanghai Center for Systems Biomedicine, and the School of Pharmacy attended the lecture.

During the seminar, Prof. LIU introduced his research progress on improving production efficiency and discovery cycle in producing complex natural products, including the formation of automatic microbial casting and microbial metabolite detecting platform, the development of targeted microbial sequencing methods and the development of chassis cells based on in-vitro reconstruction and cell-free system. Prof. LIU also introduced the key scientific issues of natural products in the field of synthetic biology from three aspects: how to create new paths, how to improve the efficiency of heterologous synthesis system, and how to get more new products faster.

During the Q&A section, the audience asked questions about how to reflect artificial intelligent manufacturing in biosynthesis and how to combine biosynthesis and chemical synthesis methods in vitamin E producing.

Prof. Linquan BAI from SLSB hosted the seminar and acknowledged the speaker’s efforts by awarding a seminar speaker medal.