Dr. Yuechen Bai | 白悦辰

Many important products in our daily life come from nature, including medicines, health supplements，antimicrobial compounds, flavors, fragrances, and agricultural chemicals. Plants are especially amazing chemical factories: since they cannot move, they have evolved the ability to produce diverse small molecules to survive, defend themselves, and adapt to environmental stresses such as drought threat, pathogens, and insects.

My research focuses on plant specialized metabolism, synthetic biology, and Al-assisted biomanufacturing. I am interested in understanding what plant molecules do in nature, discovering new bioactive compounds from medicinal plants, and developing sustainable ways to produce valuable natural products.

Our work mainly follows three directions. First, we study how plant specialized metabolites help plants adapt to changing environments and identify useful traits for future crop improvement. Second, we use metabolomics, multi-omics, genome editing, and synthetic biology to explore bioactive small molecules from traditional Chinese medicine and other medicinal plants, Third, we combine artificial intelligence and synthetic biology to design enzymes, optimize biosynthetic pathways, and build microbial or plant-based production systems for producing medicines, nutraceuticals, biomaterials, and other high-value biobased products.

In the long term, I hopes this research can contribute to sustainable agriculture, innovative medicine, and green biomanufacturing.