Chao Liang

Primary fields of research

Recent research has shown oxidative stress to be an important factor in the development and progression of obesity, T2D and cardiovascular diseases; and safe and efficient antioxidants and anti-diabetic functional food and/or new drug leads are therefore urgently needed. Plants from traditional Chinese medicine constitute an important source of new drug leads – but without sufficient knowledge about individual constituents responsible for antioxidative capacity and anti-diabetic activity , and the same applies to their cultured endophytes (i.e., microorganisms living in the intercellular space of plant material). However, extracts of TCM plants - and of their cultured endophytes - are very complex matrices of molecules with different physicochemical and biochemical properties. To advance analysis of bioactive metabolites in TCM plants and their cultured endophytes, we have developed a new metabolomics technology platform which combines high-resolution bioassay with a state-of-the-art hyphenated HPLC-HRMS-SPE-NMR system.

The first objective of my research is therefore to isolate and culture endophytes as sources of bioactive molecules. The second objective is to use our newly developed high-resolution/HPLC-HRMS-SPE-NMR platform to identify the bioactive constituents from antioxidant and antidiabetic TCM plants.