Natural Products Blog

We are delighted to welcome Professor Mingji Dai (Emory University), Professor Joshua Pierce (North Carolina State University), Dr Alisson Walker (Vanderbilt University) and Professor Nadine Ziemert (University of Tübingen) to the Natural Product Reports team as Advisory Board members!

Dr Mingji Dai is currently the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Chemistry at Emory University. He grew up in a small village in Sichuan, China. He received his B.S. degree from Peking University, Ph.D. degree from Columbia University, and postdoctoral training at Harvard University and the Broad Institute. He began his independent career as an assistant professor at Purdue University and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2018 and full professor in 2020. He moved to Emory University in 2022. His lab focuses on developing new strategies and methodologies for the synthesis of complex natural products and other medicinally important molecules.

Professor Joshua Pierce is currently the Howard J. Schaeffer Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at North Carolina State University. Research in the Pierce group is focused on harnessing the diverse architectures of marine natural products to inspire advances in chemical reaction development, chemical biology and therapeutic lead identification.

Allison Walker is an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University with a joint appointment in the Departments of Chemistry and Biological Sciences. Her research focuses on the development of machine learning and other computational tools for natural product discovery and biosynthesis. One ongoing project in the Walker lab is the development of methods to predict the activity of natural products from the sequence of the biosynthetic gene clusters that produce them. This methodology will enable more efficient genome mining for bioactive natural products.

Nadine is a Professor of Natural Product Genome Mining at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where she leads a research group at the interface of computational and wet lab research to explore the diversity and evolution of bacterial natural products, with a focus on antibiotic discovery. Her team develops and maintains tools—including ARTS, BGC Atlas, and autoMLST—that support the prediction, classification, and comparative analysis of biosynthetic gene clusters. She is a member of the German Center for Infection Research and serves on the executive board of the CMFI Cluster of Excellence. Nadine is committed to open science and collaborative tool development to advance natural product discovery and tackle the global antibiotic resistance crisis.

Find some of their recent RSC publications below:

Antarctic bacterial natural products: from genomic insights to drug discovery
Nat. Prod. Rep., 2025, Advance Article, DOI: 10.1039/D4NP00045E

Advances, opportunities, and challenges in methods for interrogating the structure activity relationships of natural products
Nat. Prod. Rep., 2024, 41, 1543-1578, DOI: 10.1039/D4NP00009A

Pyrrolidine-2,3-diones: heterocyclic scaffolds that inhibit and eradicate S. aureus biofilms
Chem. Commun., 2024, 60, 11540-11543, DOI: 10.1039/D4CC02708F

Divergent synthesis of δ-valerolactones and furanones via palladium or copper-catalyzed α-hydroxycyclopropanol ring opening cyclizations
Chem. Commun., 2024, 60, 10112-10115, DOI: 10.1039/D4CC03255A

9-Step synthesis of (−)-larikaempferic acid methyl ester enabled by skeletal rearrangement
Chem. Commun., 2024, 60, 71647167, DOI: 10.1039/D4CC01462F

The confluence of big data and evolutionary genome mining for the discovery of natural products
Nat. Prod. Rep., 2021, 38, 2024-2040, DOI: 10.1039/D1NP00013F

Natural Product Reports is delighted to welcome Professor Neha Garg to the Editorial Board.

About Neha

Neha Garg is a College of Sciences Blanchard Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology Tech broadly interested in understanding how small molecules shape microbiome composition in complex environments. Garg obtained her Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 2013 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with Professors Wilfred A. van der Donk and Satish K. Nair. Neha’s dissertation work in Illinois was recognized by the Anne A Johnson work award and the Catherine Connor Outstanding Dissertation in Biotechnology award. She then worked with Professor Pieter C. Dorrestein as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of California, San Diego where she developed metabolomics methods to visualize microbial communities.

At Georgia Tech, Garg was awarded NSF CAREER award, NIH R35 MIRA award, and Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development award to develop –omics methods for investigating chemical and immunometabolic crosstalk between host and mucus-associated probiotic and pathogenic microbes. Her work has been recognized by the Natural Product Reports Emerging Investigator Lectureship Award and the ACS Organic Division with the Academic Young Investigator Award. She has also received several teaching awards at Georgia Tech including Center for Teaching and Learning Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award and Vasser Woolley Award for Excellence in Instruction. In her research, Garg develops and applies interdisciplinary approaches in chemical microbiology, molecular biology, microscopy, mass spectrometry, (meta) transcriptomics and genomics to unveil mechanisms of chemical crosstalk. Discover more about her research on her website.

Natural Product Reports is delighted to welcome Professor Tilmann Weber to the Editorial Board.

About Tilmann:

Tilmann Weber holds a Diploma in Biology (1999), a PhD (Dr. rer. nat., 2004), and a Habilitation in Microbiology (2012) from Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen, Germany. Following his PhD, he served as a Wissenschaftlicher Assistent and Group Leader at the Interfaculty Institute of Microbiology and Infection Medicine at Tübingen University. In 2013, he joined the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Biosustain) as a Senior Researcher and Co-Principal Investigator. In 2018, he was appointed Professor of Natural Products Genome Mining at DTU Biosustain and was promoted to Associate Scientific Director in 2021. Tilmann is a faculty member at the DNRF-funded Center of Excellence “Center for Microbial Secondary Metabolites” at DTU, coordinator of the MSCA-Doctoral Network “MAGic-MOLFUN,” and head of the DTU Biosustain PhD school.

His research integrates various ‘omics technologies, computational biology, and metabolic engineering to develop and apply new tools for the discovery, characterization, and engineering of bioactive natural products. Together with international collaborators, he and his team maintain the antiSMASH genome mining platform, the antiSMASH database, and also host the community-curated MIBiG BGC reference dataset.

Natural Product Reports is delighted to welcome Professor Roger Linington to the Editorial Board.

About Roger

Professor Linington received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of Leeds and his Ph.D. in natural products chemistry from the University of British Columbia in Canada. He started his independent academic career at the University of California Santa Cruz before moving back to Canada in 2015. He is currently a Professor of Chemistry at Simon Fraser University where he holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Natural Products and High-Throughput Screening. 

His research program focuses on developing new tools in 1) chemical characterization of complex mixtures, 2) phenotypic fingerprinting of bioactive metabolites and 3) creation of informatics platforms to integrate chemical and biological datasets. Professor Linington’s research program integrates wet lab science in small molecule characterization with informatics tool development through the creation of open-source databases, webservers and informatics pipelines for small molecule discovery and characterization.

He has interests in both the practical aspects of small molecule identification and the technical aspects of developing new computational methods in this area. This includes separation science, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, database design, and algorithm development. His team maintains the Natural Products Atlas (www.npatlas.org), a database of all known microbial metabolites.

Find out more about Roger and his group on their website.

We are delighted to welcome Professor Roberto Berlinck (University of São Paulo), Dr Susana P. Gaudêncio (NOVA University of Lisbon), Dr Fidele Ntie-Kang (University of Buea), Dr Reiko Ueoka (Kitasato University) and Professor Weidong Zhang (Second Military Medical University) to the Natural Product Reports team as Advisory Board members.

Roberto is currently a Professor at the University of São Paulo. Research interests of Roberto include the biodiscovery of bioactive natural products, biosynthesis of microbial secondary metabolites, investigating the chemistry of microbe-holobionts associations as well as collaborative projects in synthesis and medicinal chemistry. One of Roberto’s group’s major interests is in developing new approaches towards the isolation of novel natural products. These include compounds from very complex biological matrixes, minor metabolites and water-soluble compounds, as well as methods for the optimisation of microbial metabolite production in order to increase isolation yields.

Susana has a MSc in Technological Organic Chemistry and a PhD in Organic Chemistry and is the Leader of the Blue Biotechnology & Biomedicine Lab at UCIBIO, NOVA-FCT, NOVA University of Lisbon. Her research focuses on the study of marine-derived Actinobacteria from off the coasts of the Portugal mainland and the Macaronesia Archipelagos for the discovery of bioactive natural products as lead-like agents for drug discovery and other biotechnological applications. She is a Working Group Leader, Management Committee Member and STSM Committee Member of the Cost Action Ocean4Biotech: CA18238 – European transdisciplinary networking platform for marine biotechnology. In 2019, she hosted two of the world’s most prestigious congresses in marine natural products, the joint XVI MANAPRO & XI ECMNP in Peniche, Portugal.

Fidele is an Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry, University of Buea in Cameroon where he also heads the Centre for Drug Discovery. After studying chemistry and physics at the University of Douala in Cameroon, he completed a PhD in computer-aided drug design. He then moved to Germany where he carried out postdoctoral research under Prof. Wolfgang Sippl leading to an habilitation in pharmaceutical chemistry. Since then, his research has been focused on chemoinformatics for natural products research, a topic in which he is an editor of a book series. He holds several editorial board appointments and is passionate about drug discovery from natural products identified from African medicinal plants. His major contribution is the development of the African Natural Products Database.

Reiko Ueoka obtained her PhD (2011) at the University of Tokyo and is currently a Junior Associate Professor at the School of Marine Biosciences, Kitasato University in Japan. Her research focuses on the discovery of novel natural products from bacteria by bioactivity-guided isolation and genome mining. She is also interested in their biosynthesis and the function of the modifying enzymes.

Wei-Dong Zhang is currently a professor of the Institute of Medicinal Plant Development and Second Military Medical University. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree and Master’s degree from Second Military Medical University in 1988 and 1991, respectively. He received his PhD in Natural Product Chemistry in 1998 from the Shanghai Institute of Pharmaceutical Industry with Professor Hui-Ting Li. His research focuses on the total synthesis, biological function, structural modification and structure-activity relationship of structurally complex and bioactive natural products.

Find some of their recent RSC publications below:

Visible-light-induced [3+2] cycloadditions of donor/donor diazo intermediates with alkenes to achieve (spiro)-pyrazolines and pyrazoles
Chem. Sci., 2023, 14, 10411-10419, DOI: 10.1039/D3SC04188C, Edge Article

Uranyl nitrate as a recyclable homogeneous photocatalyst for selective cross-coupling of N-substituted amines and indoles
RSC. Adv., 2023, 13, 11929-11937, DOI: 10.1039/D3RA01037F, Paper

The isolation of water-soluble natural products – challenges, strategies and perspectives
Nat. Prod. Rep., 2022, 39, 596-669, DOI: 10.1039/D1NP00037C, Review Article

The chemistry and biology of guanidine secondary metabolites
Nat. Prod. Rep., 2021, 38, 586-667, DOI: 10.1039/D0NP00051E, Review Article

Cytotoxic and antitumor peptides as novel chemotherapeutics
Nat. Prod. Rep., 2021, 38, 7-17, DOI: 10.1039/D0NP00019A, Highlight

Post-synthetic functionalization of tryptophan protected peptide sequences through indole (C-2) photocatalytic alkylation
Chem. Commun., 2021, 57, 5758-5761, DOI: 10.1039/D1CC01822A, Communication

In search of therapeutic candidates for HIV/AIDS: rational approaches, design strategies, structure–activity relationship and mechanistic insights
RSC. Adv., 2021, 11, 17936-17964, DOI: 10.1039/D0RA10655K, Review Article

Natural products in Cyperus rotundus L. (Cyperaceae): an update of the chemistry and pharmacological activities
RSC. Adv., 2021, 11, 15070-15077, DOI: 10.1039/D1RA00478F, Review Article

Dereplication: racing to speed up the natural products discovery process
Nat. Prod. Rep., 2015, 32, 779-810, DOI: 10.1039/C4NP00134F, Review Article

Colibactin biosynthesis and biological activity depend on the rare aminomalonyl polyketide precursor
Chem. Commun., 2015, 51, 13138-13141, DOI: 10.1039/C5CC02718G, Communication

Natural Product Reports is delighted to welcome Associate Professor Alessandra Eustáquio and Professor Hidetoshi Tokuyama to the Editorial Board.

About Alessandra

Alessandra holds a BSc in Pharmacy and Biochemistry from the University of São Paulo, Brazil and a PhD in Pharmaceutical Biology from the University of Tübingen, Germany. After undergoing postdoctoral training at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, she was a Principal Scientist in the Natural Products group of Pfizer’s Research & Development site in Connecticut, USA for four years.

She is currently an Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the College of Pharmacy, University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on natural product biosynthesis and the development of synthetic biology tools to facilitate access to natural and engineered molecules. Find out more about Alessandra’s research on her webpage.

About Hidetoshi

Hidetoshi is a Professor at the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tohoku University in Japan. He obtained a BSc, MSc and PhD in Chemistry from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1990, 1992 and 1994, respectively, supervised by Professor Eiichi Nakamura. After spending a year as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Amos B Smith III at the University of Pennsylvania, he started his academic career as an assistant professor in Professor Tohru Fukuyama’s group at the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Tokyo in 1996, where he was later promoted to lecturer and associate professor. Since 2006, he has been a full professor at Tohoku University.

His research focuses on the development of synthetic methodologies including highly chemoselective functional group interconversions and the construction of N-containing heterocycles, and the total synthesis of structurally complex natural products. Find out more about Hidetoshi’s research on his webpage.