About State Key Laboratory of Bio-organic and Natural Products Chemistry

State Key Laboratory of Bio-organic and Natural Products Chemistry

Overview at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry

The State Key Laboratory of Bio-organic and Natural Products Chemistry is one of two state key laboratories at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, at 345 Lingling Road in Shanghai, alongside the State Key Laboratory of Organometallic Chemistry. Its research centres, in the candidate record for this profile, on the total synthesis of complex natural products, chemical biology and photochemical biology. The institute's own recruitment pages list closely related directions including total synthesis and mechanistic study of biologically important complex natural products, isolation and structure elucidation of natural products, enzymatic catalysis and biomass transformation, cell biology, and the chemistry and biology of nucleic acids.

Bio-organic chemistry works at the boundary between organic chemistry and biology: it uses the methods of organic synthesis and analysis to make, probe and understand molecules produced by living organisms and molecules that act on living systems. Natural products chemistry is its oldest strand, concerned with isolating compounds from organisms, determining their structures, synthesising them in the laboratory, and learning how their structures produce biological activity that may lead toward medicines, agrochemicals or research tools.

The laboratory is part of the institute's Center for Excellence in Molecular Synthesis in recent affiliations, as shown on papers carrying both names. The Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, founded in May 1950, organises its work around chemical biology, methodologies for chemical transformation and organic materials science. This laboratory contributes most directly to chemical biology and to synthesis, connecting natural-product targets with biological questions.

Host institute founded in 1950

The Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry was founded in May 1950, following the merger of the Institute of Chemistry of the former Central Academy of Sciences with chemistry and materia medica institutes of the former Peking Academy of Sciences, with Zhuang Changgong as its first director, according to the CAS Shanghai Branch history. It merged further with an organic chemistry group in 1952, saw its materia medica department branch off in 1953, expanded substantially in 1958, and was renamed the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry in 1970.

The institute's present structure, as given in its English recruitment and education pages, includes eight research departments or twelve laboratories depending on the page's counting, including the two state key laboratories, two CAS key laboratories for organofluorine chemistry and for synthetic chemistry of natural substances, and laboratories of physical organic chemistry, analytical chemistry, materials science, and computer chemistry and informatics. The coexistence of a CAS laboratory for synthetic chemistry of natural substances with the bio-organic state key laboratory shows how central natural products have been to the institute's identity.

Graduate education is integral to that structure. The institute records more than 440 graduate students in residence and, cumulatively, 2,208 graduate students trained, including 466 doctoral and 695 master's degrees, in its education pages, taught by a tutor team including nine CAS academicians and 98 senior professionals. A synthesis laboratory of this kind depends on doctoral researchers, because a total synthesis of a complex natural product is typically the multi-year work of a team of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.

Total synthesis of complex natural products

Total synthesis means building a complex natural molecule entirely from simpler chemical starting materials, confirming its structure and making it available for study without harvesting the source organism. The laboratory's output in this area is documented in leading journals. Yikang Wu's group reported studies directed to the total synthesis of cepacin A, a potent antibacterial substance produced by Pseudomonas cepacia, constructing a bromoallenyl-substituted epoxide fragment from D-arabinose as a chiral starting material, in Helvetica Chimica Acta in 2004, with the laboratory's affiliation at the institute's former Fenglin Road address.

A later example is the first enantioselective total synthesis of parnafungin A1, a heterodimeric biaryl antifungal natural product, together with the complex biaryl tetrahydroxanthone 10a-epi-hirtusneanine, published in Chemical Science in 2021 by Jiawei Sun, Wei Gu, He Yang and Wenjun Tang's group at the laboratory. The synthesis used a benzoxaborole cross-coupling strategy to construct sterically hindered biaryl cores, prepared both tetrahydroxanthone monomers from a common chiral intermediate, and reversed a hydroxyl group's stereochemistry by oxidation and Evans-Saksena reduction. The paper's affiliation explicitly joins the laboratory with the Center for Excellence in Molecular Synthesis.

Carbohydrate and nucleoside targets form another documented line. Biao Yu's group at the laboratory reported the total synthesis of the nucleoside antibiotic A201A, a unique nucleoside antibiotic with potent antibacterial activity, achieved for the first time in 47 steps, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 2014, by Shenyou Nie, Wei Li and Biao Yu. A 47-step first synthesis is not a practical manufacturing route; its scientific value lies in proving the structure can be assembled, revealing methods that later work can shorten, and supplying material and analogues for biological study.

Catalysis in service of natural products

Although catalysis is associated with the neighbouring organometallic laboratory, the bio-organic laboratory also develops catalytic methods when they unlock natural-product targets. Wenjun Tang's group developed P-chiral phosphorus ligands, including the bisphosphorus ligand WingPhos for asymmetric hydrogenation and cross-coupling, and the monophosphorus ligand AntPhos, whose palladium-catalysed enantioselective intramolecular dearomative cyclization enabled efficient syntheses of the alkaloids crinine and aspidospermidine and a formal synthesis of minfiensine, reported in Chemical Science in 2017. Those alkaloids bear all-carbon quaternary centres and diverse biological activities, making them demanding test targets.

Tang's own background, recorded in a Tokyo Chemical Industry review, includes a bachelor's degree in engineering in 1998 and doctoral training associated with the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, and his ligand work was supported by national programmes and by the Innovation Fund of the State Key Laboratory of Bio-organic and Natural Products Chemistry, as acknowledged in that review. The acknowledgement names the laboratory's own innovation fund, a mechanism by which state key laboratories seed internal projects.

The lesson for readers is that the boundary between the institute's two state key laboratories is porous in practice. Method developers need challenging targets to prove generality, and total-synthesis groups need new selective reactions to reach those targets. Papers from this laboratory therefore often combine both: a new ligand or reaction is introduced and immediately validated by completing a named natural product.

Chemical biology and photochemical biology

Chemical biology uses synthetic molecules as probes and tools to study and perturb living systems. The candidate record names chemical biology and photochemical biology as centres of the laboratory's research, and individual biographies document what that means in practice. Yiyun Chen joined the laboratory in autumn 2011 as a research fellow and project leader after a bachelor's degree from Peking University in 2002, a PhD from Princeton University in 2007 and postdoctoral work at Harvard University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, according to his Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study biography, which records his laboratory appointment directly.

Chen's research interest is biocompatible visible-light chemistry: developing new visible-light-induced reactions that can operate in biological settings to regulate biomolecular functions, discovering new visible-light reactions and building visible-light chemical-biology tools. His biography records more than thirty papers and book chapters in journals including Nature Chemistry, Nature Chemical Biology, the Journal of the American Chemical Society and Angewandte Chemie, a Thieme Chemistry Journal Award, an Excellent Young Scientists Fund award from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and editorial board service for ChemPhotoChem.

Visible light is attractive for chemical biology because it can be switched, patterned and timed precisely, and because biocompatible reactions aim to work without damaging the cells or biomolecules under study. A photochemical-biology programme inside a natural-products laboratory is a natural pairing: the synthesis groups supply complex molecules, while the chemical-biology groups ask how light-controlled and bioorthogonal chemistry can deploy molecules inside living systems with spatial and temporal control.

Isolation, structure and biological function

Synthesis is only one half of natural products chemistry. The institute's recruitment directions for this area also include isolation and structure elucidation of natural products, enzymatic catalysis and biomass transformation, cell biology, and nucleic acid chemistry and biology. Isolation identifies which molecule in an organism carries an observed activity; structure elucidation determines its exact constitution and stereochemistry; only then can synthesis confirm the assignment and biology establish how the molecule acts.

Historical work at the host institute shows the depth of that tradition. The institute began purification and primary-structure study of trichosanthin, a medicinal protein, in 1973, and its crystal structure was determined in 1978 in collaboration with the Institute of Biophysics and the Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, only the second protein structure independently completed by Chinese scientists, according to a peer-reviewed history of protein crystallography in China. Trichosanthin is a protein rather than a small-molecule natural product, but the episode documents the institute's long engagement with biologically active natural substances and their structures.

Enzymatic catalysis and biomass transformation extend the same logic to sustainable production: enzymes isolated from nature can perform selective transformations that are difficult for conventional reagents, and biomass provides renewable starting material. Together with cell biology and nucleic acid work, those directions place the laboratory's chemistry in direct contact with the living systems from which its target molecules come.

Scholarly record and Nature Index presence

The laboratory maintains its own research profile in the Nature Index, which tracks output in a selected set of leading natural-science journals. In the Nature Index window from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026 shown at the time of research, the laboratory was credited with three counted articles and a fractional share of 0.25, all in chemistry. The host institute in the same window was credited with 471 counted articles and a share of 91.75, with chemistry the largest subject. Small numbers in a single Nature Index window should not be over-interpreted, because affiliations on individual papers vary between the laboratory, the center and the institute.

The laboratory's primary-literature footprint is broader than any single index window. Its affiliation appears on total syntheses, ligand and catalysis papers, and chemical-biology studies across the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie, Chemical Science, Nature Chemistry and specialist journals over several decades, with author addresses moving from the institute's former 354 Fenglin Road site to the present 345 Lingling Road site as the institute's campus changed.

For verification, readers can search the laboratory's exact name in journal databases, where it appears in author affiliations, or consult the Nature Index institution page, which lists it as an affiliated institution of the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry under the Center for Excellence in Molecular Synthesis, alongside the CAS Key Laboratory of Organofluorine Chemistry and the State Key Laboratory of Organometallic Chemistry and the newer State Key Laboratory of Chemical Biology listing.

Significance for medicine and molecular synthesis

Natural products remain one of the richest historical sources of medicines and of molecular structures that chemists would not have designed unaided. A laboratory that can isolate, determine, synthesise and modify such molecules, and study their action through chemical biology, covers the full path from an observed biological effect to a defined, reproducible molecular tool. The documented syntheses of an antibacterial nucleoside antibiotic, an antifungal biaryl natural product and bioactive alkaloids show that path being applied to anti-infective and alkaloid chemistry in particular.

The institute states its ambition to be a key research centre of organic chemistry in China, a cradle of organic chemists, and one of the key bases of organic chemistry research, and it reports that about thirty percent of its research budget in an earlier period came through cooperation with companies, including patent authorisations and sales, according to Chemical and Engineering News reporting on the institute. Within that system, the bio-organic laboratory's role is the biological end of molecular synthesis: complex molecules whose value is measured by what they reveal and do in living systems.

This profile therefore records the laboratory as a research institution, not a pharmaceutical producer. Its verified facts are its host, its address at 345 Lingling Road in Shanghai, its partnership with the organometallic laboratory as the institute's two state key laboratories, its documented research centres in total synthesis, chemical biology and photochemical biology, and a publication record in leading journals that any reader can check under its exact name.