Liangcai Gu

Dr. Liangcai Gu completed his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry with Professor David Sherman at University of Michigan in 2008. He in vitro reconstituted a 65-enzyme biosynthetic pathway of curacin A, an anticancer bacterial metabolite. His work led to discoveries of a set of unexpected biochemical reactions important to polyketide diversification and provided a basis for engineering of the enzymes into other pathways to produce valuable chemicals. He then conducted his postdoctoral research in proteomics and next-generation sequencing techniques in Professor George Church laboratory at Harvard Medical School. He developed an in situ DNA sequencing-based molecular interactome technique, single-molecular-interaction sequencing (SMI-seq), which can largely improve the throughput, multiplexing capability, quality and cost-effectiveness of protein interactome profiling, and were shown to be useful in quantification of interactome changes in human diseases, ultra-low cost small molecule drug screening, and selection of large-scale affinity reagents for proteomics applications.