Sophia Xu talks about “converging paths”.
The second season of BioGenesis centers on the theme of “converging paths.” This episode features graduate student Sophia Xu, who’s bringing together modern scientific methods and ancient Eastern herbal remedies. She studies molecules in plants to investigate how molecules in natural products interact with proteins in the human body — and she may even find a cure for hangovers along the way.
Probing the Health Molecules of Plants: The Weng Lab at Whitehead Institute
The Weng Lab members discuss with Science for the Public about research to investigate plant molecules for their medical potential.
Herbal Medicines Decoded: How Medicinal Plants Soothe and Cure
Jing-Ke Weng discusses with Science for the Public about the process, the discoveries, and the challenge of simulating plant chemistry for large-scale medical purposes.
The chemist and the poet
Jeandele Elliot spent the summer studying a durable compound in pollen and developing equally durable friendships, an article by Saima Sidik.
Mentorship goes a long way.
A big shout-out for the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP), which has had a longstanding impact on many students who came through the program over the years (see MIT News). We are honored to have participated in the program as a host lab in the past years. Great to have hosted Jeandele Elliot this summer, who is a chemical engineering student from Howard University. We look forward to seeing her doing fantastic things in the years to come!
Farewell to Roland, who will soon launch his own lab at University of Michigan.
The Weng lab says farewell to Roland, who is moving to University of Michigan to start his own lab. Roland is the first faculty hire through the University of Michigan’s Inaugural Biosciences Initiative, and will join faculty of the College of Pharmacy’s Department of Medicinal Chemistry. Congrats!!
Weng Lab receives a grant from the Keck Foundation for enzyme evolution research.
Associate Professor Jing-Ke Weng of the Whitehead Institute and MIT is the recipient of a $1 million grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to develop new biotechnologies that enable directed evolution of metabolic enzymes at will. If successful, this project will have a transformative impact upon multiple fields by enabling the unprecedented capability to create new designer medicines and commodity chemicals.
Uncovering the riches of traditional global medicine
Tomas’ paper on elucidation of kavalactone biosynthesis in Polynesian medicinal plant kava kava is published at Nature Plants. See the news release from MIT News here and NPR here.
