Spring into Science - Tapping into Plants' Natural Chemical Arsenals Without Taxing Nature

Description

Part Three of Whitehead Institute's Spring into Science Series

Jing-Ke Weng, a Member of Whitehead Institute and an assistant professor of biology at MIT, will discuss how discoveries in natural product chemistry and biochemistry, particularly from plants, have impacted our society in big ways. The rapid advances in emerging fields such as genomics and synthetic biology have now enabled us to explore and exploit the remarkable diversity of plant chemistry in an entirely new way. Small molecules are low molecular-weight organic compounds omnipresent in all living organisms. Humans have a long history of using these compounds from nature to fulfill a wide range of purposes including forming the basis for traditional global medicine.