Research Areas

Production and supplement of diversed natural compounds are essential for the expansion of chemical library. Thus, we develop isolation techniques of secondary metabolites from microbe, derivatize natural products by genetic engineering and synthetic chemistry. We develop systems to construct chemical library of microbial metabolites with various structures and biological activities. We are trying to diversify properties of the microbial metabolites by modifying gene clusters of the microorganisms which are responsible for secondary metabolite synthesis. In this project, we utilize Streptomyces genome sequence information which have been analyzed in collaboration with RIKEN GSC group and fungal genome sequence database. The chemical diversity in our library is also increased by modifying chemicals deposited in our chemical bank. Diversity and target oriented modifications of the chemicals are approaches used for the derivatization.

Research Subject

1. Systematic construction of secondary microbial metabolite library
2. Production of various new chemicals using genetic engineering methods
3. Diversity and target oriented modification of chemicals