JIA Meirong
Principal Investigator
Professor Jia Meirong obtained her PhD degree from Iowa State University and completed postdoctoral training in University of California, Davis. After that she was recruited as a tenure-track assistant professor in Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College and has worked as a principal investigator at the Institute of Materia Medica since 2021. Jia's group mainly focuses on study of bioactive substances from medicinal plants including their discovery, biosynthesis, structural optimization and heterologous production. The group has made great progress in gene mining of terpene-related enzymes and their catalytic mechanism investigation, which has been published in several international high-impact peer-reviewed journals such as ACS Catalysis and Metabolic Engineering.
1. Jasmonic acid transport in wound-induced systemic immunity. Molecular Plant . 2020, 13:1673.
2. Switching on a nontraditional enzymatic base–deprotonation by serine in the ent-kaurene synthase from Bradyrhizobium japonicum. ACS Catal . 2019, 9:8867-71.
3. Combinatorial biosynthesis and the basis for substrate promiscuity in class I diterpene synthases. Metab Eng . 2019, 55:44-58.
4. Changing face: A key residue for the addition of water by sclareol synthase. ACS Catal . 2018, 8:3133-7.
5. Extreme promiscuity of a bacterial and a plant diterpene synthase enables combinatorial biosynthesis. Metab Eng . 2016, 37:24-34.
6. A pair of residues that interactively affect diterpene synthase product outcome. ACS Chem. Biol . 2017, 12:862-7.
7. Extending a single residue switch for abbreviating catalysis in plant ent-kaurene synthases. Frontiers in Plant Science . 2016, 7:1765.
8. Cis or Trans with class II diterpene cyclases. Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry , 2017, 15:3158-60.
9. Genome of Tripterygium wilfordii and identification of cytochrome P450 involved in triptolide biosynthesis. Nat Commun . 2020, 11:971.
10. Premutilin synthase: Ring rearrangement by a Class II diterpene cyclase. Org Lett . 2018, 20:1200-2.
11. Product rearrangement from altering a single residue in the rice syn-copalyl diphosphate synthase. Org Lett . 2016, 18:1060-3.
12. Probing the promiscuity of ent-kaurene oxidases via combinatorial biosynthesis. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A . 2016, 113:2526-31.
1. Synthetic Biology of Active Compounds. In book: Molecular Pharmacognosy, second edition. Edited by Luqi Huang. Springer press . Chapter 9, 2019, 267-292. Print ISBN 978-981-32-9033-4.
2. Functional Genome of Medicinal Plants. In book: Molecular Pharmacognosy, second edition. Edited by Luqi Huang. Springer press . Chapter 7, 2019, 191-234. Print ISBN 978-981-32-9033-4.
