Research

Goals of our research:

1. Gain experimental access to new chemical space through the “upside-down” world of photochemistry. For example, in seven steps simple building blocks are coupled and cyclized through suitable intramolecular reactions to give a series of structures with substantially increased structural complexity. These structures occupy unsampled regions of chemical space.

2. Leverage measurements and quantitative descriptions to better understand, model, and improve synthetic chemistry. We rely on several kinds of measurements that help us design new synthetic methods. For “static” structures, X-ray diffraction is indispensible. We use traditional chemometrics methods to extract information about intermediates, reaction rates, and general mechanistic details of the reactions.

3. Connect structures of newly-made molecules to their biological effects in complex living systems. We use cell painting to sift through the compounds we synthesized. We found a few potentially bioactive compounds from compound collections of moderate size, populated by molecules from previously unsampled chemical space. These initial discoveries form the foundations for further studies into the detailed mechanism of action of these compounds.

XK1387: XK6719: