Qingfei Zheng

Title:

Assistant Professor

PhD Granting Institution:

Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Contact:

Email Address: zhengqf@purdue.edu
Office Phone: +1 765-494-1149
Lab Website Link: https://www.mcmp.purdue.edu/faculty/zhengqf

Primary Training Group:

Chemical Biology

Secondary Training Groups:

Microbiology, Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Cancer Biology

Research Areas:

Chemical Biology, Synthetic Biology, Drug Discovery, Protein/Peptide Chemistry, Microbiology, Epigenetics, Cancer Biology & Therapeutics

Current Projects:

Our lab applies multidisciplinary technologies (such as biochemistry, biophysics, chemical biology, medicinal chemistry, and synthetic biology approaches) to answer two basic questions: 1) how tumor microenvironment metabolism contribute to cancer progression; and 2) how to target and take advantage of tumor microenvironment metabolism for cancer therapy (especially immuno-oncology). Specifically, my lab has developed a series of chemical biology tools and chemical proteomics approaches to study novel histone post-translational modifications (PTMs) that are directly or indirectly induced by microbial metabolites (e.g., histone glycation and monoaminylation). Employing these powerful chemical biology methodologies, my lab identified a number of previously unreported or unnamed PTMs on histones and uncovered their epigenetic functions in cancer development and treatment. Our work has provided new insights to understand the associations between the human microbiome metabolism and epigenetic regulations, thus facilitating the discovery of new drugs targeting these novel pathways.

Importance of Interdisciplinary Research:

Being identified and recognized as a laboratory of chemical synthetic biology, my lab aspires to understand chemistry and biology from two angles, that is, developing new chemical tools/approaches to study complex biological mechanisms (chemical biology) and engineering novel biological systems to produce challenging chemicals for theraputics (synthetic biology).