Tao Zeng

Biography

I’m an associate professor in Pharmacy at Hainan University, working in the group “Intelligent Mining and Biomanufacturing of Natural Products” led by Prof. Ruibo Wu. My research involves developing data-driven and physical-based models that assist in drug discovery and synthesis, especially for natural products. Examples include database and webserver development, molecular generation, retrosynthesis planning and enzyme design.

Before joining Hainan University, I completed my post-doctor research (2023-2024, advised by Prof. Sheng Yin and Prof. Ruibo Wu) and Ph.D. degree (2018-2023, advised by Prof. Ruibo Wu) in Medicinal Chemistry from Sun Yat-sen University. I got my bachelor’s degree (2014-2018) in Pharmacy from Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Research Interests

• Cheminformatics: natural products database development, chemical space analysis
• Drug Design: molecular generation, quantitative structure-activity modeling
• Synthetic Biology: bio-retrosynthesis planning, molecular dynamics simulation, enzyme design

Publications

• T Zeng, J Li, R Wu*. Natural Product Databases for Drug Discovery: Features and Applications. Pharm Sci Adv, 2024, 2, 100050.
• T Zeng, Z Jin, S Zheng, T Yu, R Wu*. Developing BioNavi for Hybrid Retrosynthesis Planning. JACS Au, 2024, 4, 7, 2492–2502.
• T Zeng, R Wu*. Data-driven Prediction and Design for Enzymatic Reactions. Synthetic Biology Journal. 2023, 4, 535-550.
• N Chen^#, R Zhang^#, T Zeng^#, X Zhang, R Wu*. Developing TeroENZ and TeroMAP modules for the terpenome research platform TeroKit. Database, 2023, 2023, baad020.
• S Zheng^#, T Zeng^#, C Li, B Chen, Connor W. Coley, Y Yang, R Wu. Deep learning driven biosynthetic pathways navigation for natural products with BioNavi-NP. Nat Commun, 2022, 13, 3342.
• T Zeng, B. Hess Jr., F Zhang, R Wu*. Bio-inspired Chemical Space Exploration of Terpenoids. Brief Bioinform, 2022, 23, bbac197.
• T Zeng^#, Y Chen^#, Y Jian, F Zhang, R Wu*. Chemotaxonomic Investigation of Plant Terpenoids with an Established Database (TeroMOL). New Phytol, 2022, 235, 662-673.
• T Zeng^#, Z Liu^#, J Zhuang, Y Jiang, W He, H Diao, N Lv, Y Jian, D Liang, Y Qiu, R Zhang, F Zhang, X Tang, R Wu*. TeroKit: A Database-Driven Web Server for Terpenome Research. J Chem Inf Model, 2020, 60, 2082-2090.
• T Zeng^#, Z Liu^#, H Liu, W He, X Tang, L Xie, R Wu*. Exploring Chemical and Biological Space of Terpenoids. J Chem Inf Model, 2019, 59, 3667-3678.

Databases and Services

• TeroKit: A toolkit for terpenome research.
• BioNavi-NP: A bio-retrosynthesis navigator for natural products.
• BioNavi: A hybrid retrosynthesis navigator fro chemicals.