Wen Li

Dr. Wenshe Liu received his BS degree from Peking University in 2000 and his Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Dr. Michael D. Toney from University of California-Davis in 2005. Following two years of postdoctoral training in Dr. Peter G. Schultz group in the Scripps Research Institute, he started his independent research group as an assistant professor at Texas A&M University in 2007. Dr. Liu was promoted to the associate professor rank in 2013 and furthered to the full professor rank in 2016. He is currently holding the Emile and Marta Schweikert endowed professorship in the Texas A&M Chemistry Department. Dr. Liu was originally trained to work on both enzymology and protein crystallography during his Ph.D. study and later switched to organic chemistry and molecular biology during his postdoctoral training. His current research group has two operating branches. One is organic synthesis and the other is molecular and biological chemistry. The technical basis of research in Liu group is the amber suppression based noncanonical amino acid mutagenesis, targeted questions being different. One focus is to build methods for the synthesis of chromatin with specific lysine modifications for the illustration of how these modifications influence chromatin structures, interactions with transcription factors, recognition by epigenetic enzymes, and the control of other modifications in chromatin. The second focus is to develop techniques for integrating one or two noncanonical amino acids into phage displayed peptide libraries. These noncanonical amino acids serve as active chemical handles to cyclize peptide libraries, anchor enzyme/protein active sites, and expand chemical diversities of libraries by reacting with other small molecules. The ultimate goal of this research direction is to identify tight and selective inhibitors of epigenetic enzymes that can be applied for cancer treatment.