The BotCats Lab aspires to harness the creativity of contemporary chemistry to transform molecular interrogations. We combine our discoveries and knowledge in molecular design and synthetic chemistry to support our missions to develop disruptive technologies for precision healthcare and sustainable production.

Our research interests are focused on three major themes:

Theme 1 | Biocompatible Chemistry

We expand the bioorthogonal chemistry toolkits by tapping into the vast compendium of transition metal catalysis and translating them into biocompatible reactions. We are especially interested to explore the use of biocompatible catalysts for in vitro and sustainable synthesis.

Green Chemistry | Sustainable Synthesis | Circular Economy

Theme 2 | Enzyme-like Mimetics

We combine computational design, peptide synthesis and orthogonal chemistry to design bio-inspired constrained peptides with three-dimensional enzyme-like architecture.  Our goals are to create a new class of biorecognition elements with programmable functionalities.

Biomimicry | De novo Design | Enzyme Mechanisms

Theme 3 | Bioorthogonal Interrogations

We create hybrid catalysts by combining synthetic catalysts with biorecognition elements. By harnessing the power of Nature’s biorecognition and new-to-nature metal reactivity to perform chemistry on important biomolecules, we will deploy our tools for biomarker detection.

Bioorthogonal Chemistry | Biomarker Detection | Targeted Bioimaging