Biography

Lihan Zhang, originally from Jilin, China, grew up in Nagano, Japan, where he became interested in science as a high school student. After entering the University of Tokyo, he joined the laboratory of Professor Ikuro Abe, and obtained his B.S. (2012) and Ph.D. (2017) in pharmaceutical sciences from the university. He then moved to the laboratory of Professor Emily Balskus at Harvard University to pursue postdoctoral research on natural products and chemical biology. Dr. Zhang joined the faculty at Westlake University in September 2019. He has been awarded multiple honors and fellowships, including The University of Tokyo Fellowship, the JSPS Research Fellowship, and the JSPS Overseas Research Fellowship, and obtained excellent young researcher awards in China at a province level (Zhejiang 2020) and at a national level (2022).

Research

Dr. Zhang has been working on the discovery, biosynthesis, and bioengineering of natural products. Fascinated by polyketide natural products particularly, his scientific achievements include: (1) elucidating the evolutionary mechanism of modular polyketide synthases, which opened the door to evolution-guided engineering of these modular enzymes; (2) unveiled the global landscape of type II polyketide synthases and the aromatic polyketides by large-scale bioinformatics.

These results have set the basis for efficient genome mining of natural products and rational redesign of polyketide biosynthesis, which has numerous applications in drug discovery, medicinal chemistry, and synthetic biology. He also has rich experience and interest in a vast range of natural products including peptides and terpenes. Currently, the Zhang lab aims to understand the natural products distribution, structural diversity, and evolution, as well as to exploit biosynthetic enzymes to create valuable molecules by synthetic biology.

Representative Publications

1. Xie, S.;Zhang, L."Type II Polyketide Synthases: A Bioinformatics-Driven Approach" ChemBioChem2023, e202200775

2. Chen, S.#; Zhang, C.#;Zhang, L."Investigation of the Molecular Landscape of Bacterial Aromatic Polyketides by Global Analysis of Type II Polyketide Synthases." Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.2022, 61, e202202286. Selected as Inside Front Cover

3.Zhang, L.*; Awakawa, T.; Abe, I.* "Understanding and manipulating assembly line biosynthesis by heterologous expression in Streptomyces" Engineering Natural Product Biosynthesis. Methods in Molecular Biology (Book chapter)2022, 2489. Humana, NY.

4. Liu, R.-Z.; Chen, S.;Zhang, L."A Streptomyces P450 enzyme dimerizes isoflavones from plants" Beilstein J. Org. Chem.2022, 18, 1107-1115

5. Zhang, L.#, Hashimoto, T.#, Qin, B., Hashimoto, J., Kozone, I., Kawahara, T., Okada, M., Awakawa, T., Ito, T., Asakawa, Y., Ueki, M., Takahashi, S., Osada, H., Wakimoto, T., Ikeda, H.*, Shin-ya, K.*, Abe, I.* “Characterization of giant modular PKSs provides insight into genetic mechanism for structural diversification of aminopolyol polyketides” Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2017, 56, 1740-1745. (*equal contribution). Highlighted in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2017, 57, 4658–4660. Selected as Frontispecies. 

6.Zhang, L., Hoshino, S., Awakawa, T., Wakimoto, T., Abe, I., “Structural Diversification of Lyngbyatoxin A by Host-Dependent Heterologous Expression of the tleABC Biosynthetic Gene Cluster” ChemBioChem, 2016, 17, 1407–1411. 

7. Zhang, L., Mori, T., Zheng, Q., Awakawa, T., Yan, Y., Liu, W., Abe, I., “Rational control of polyketide extender units by structure-based engineering of a crotonyl-CoA carboxylase/ reductase in antimycin biosynthesis” Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2015, 54, 13462–13465. Highlighted in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2015, 55, 858–860.  

Contact Information and Open Positions

We have openings for Postdocs, Ph.D. students, and research assistants within the field of natural product chemistry, biosynthesis, bioinformatics, synthetic biology, microbiology, and chemical biology. Please contact zhanglihan@westlake.edu.cn, if you are interested in joining us.