Dr. Yupeng Liang pursued his Ph.D. from 2020 to 2025 in the research group of Professor Mengliang Wen at Yunnan University. During his doctoral studies, he focused on two main research areas. The first direction centered on the biosynthesis of plant natural products, integrating chemoinformatics and phylogenetic chemical mapping to elucidate the biosynthetic pathways and evolutionary patterns of natural products, as well as achieving heterologous reconstruction of natural products in microbial chassis. The second direction involved enzyme resource development. Using protein structure prediction and analysis tools such as AlphaFold2/3 and Foldseek, Dr. Liang developed a large-scale enzyme mining process and explored new modes of enzyme discovery in the post-AlphaFold era. Dr. Liang has published several papers as the first author (including co-first author) in peer-reviewed journals such as J. Agric. Food Chem. and Biomolecules. In July 2025, Dr. Liang joined the College of Chemistry and the Frontier Research Center for New Organic Matter at Nankai University to conduct postdoctoral research. His current research focuses on the discovery and rational design of artificial photoenzymes.

Publications:

1.      Liang, Y.†, Zhao, Y.†, Yin, Z., Gong, X., Han, X.*, Wen, M.*. Conserved Local Structural Motifs in Glycoside Hydrolase Families Facilitate the Discovery of Functional Enzymes. J. Agric. Food Chem. 2025, May 14;73(19):11983-11997.

2.      Liang, Y.†, Zhao, Y.†, Yin, Z., Zeng, X., Han, X.*, & Wen, M.*. Functional and structural insights into α-L-Rhamnosidase: cloning, characterization, and decoding evolutionary constraints through structural motif. Arch Microbiol., 2025, 207(3), 61.

3.      Zhao, Y.†, Liang, Y.†, Luo, G., Li, Y., Han, X.*, & Wen, M.*. Sequence-Structure Analysis Unlocking the Potential Functional Application of the Local 3D Motifs of Plant-Derived Diterpene Synthases. Biomolecules, 2024, 14(1), 120. (ǂContributed equally to this work)