Professor Yi Tang has been named the winner of the 2025 Marvin J. Johnson Award in Microbial and Biochemical Technology by the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Biochemical Technology (BIOT).
This memorial award was established in 1979 to recognize outstanding research contributions to microbial and biochemical technology. Tang will receive the award and give a lecture at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Spring meeting in San Diego (March 23-27).
“Yi Tang has developed experimental and bioinformatic methods to trace biosynthetic pathways – how nature makes complex molecules that form the heart of the pharmaceutical industry,” said Professor Ken Houk. “This award recognizes our great colleague who I am delighted to be able to collaborate with on a regular basis. He has discovered new natural products and enzymes that will enable more efficient synthesis of complex natural products and drugs.”
Tang is Professor in Chemistry and Biochemistry, the Parsons Family Foundation Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and also a Professor in Bioengineering at UCLA.
“This award is a great thing for UCLA, recognizing Yi’s world-leadership in engineering microbial metabolism to discover bioactive compounds,” said Professor Neil Garg, another active collaborator with the Tang lab.
The Tang group has developed new advanced synthetic biology tools to enable microorganisms to produce all the natural products encoded in their genomes, revealing new natural products not previously accessible. They can mine natural products with specific enzyme targets, and this recently led to the discovery of a new herbicide that has shown promise in overcoming previous herbicides’ limitations.
Tang’s lab has also developed powerful tools for mining genomes to rediscover natural chemical diversity. With scientists at Stanford, a high-throughput approach to reconstitute hundreds of biosynthetic pathways in engineered yeast was developed. This innovation led to the founding of Hexagon Biosciences, a successful startup launched in 2017.
The Tang group has engineered enzymes from biosynthetic pathways into commercially used biocatalysts, notably simvastatin, a widely used cholesterol-lowering drug. This biocatalytic process replaces traditional multistep chemical synthesis and won the ACS Green Chemistry Award in 2012. The method has since been used to produce thousands of tons of simvastatin.
Over the past decade, Tang’s lab has made significant contributions to the discovery of novel enzymes involved in natural product biosynthesis, revealing previously unknown enzymatic reactions. A key breakthrough was the identification of a new family of S-adenosylmethionine (SAM)-dependent enzymes that catalyze pericyclic reactions, expanding the role of SAM in biology.
“Yi and I coined the term, pericyclases, to describe the family of enzymes that he and others discovered that catalyze pericyclic reactions, reactions that are fundamentally different from those involved in metabolism,” Houk noted. Together with Houk and other colleagues in the department, including Professors Joseph Loo and Jose Rodriguez, Tang’s lab recently reported the discovery of a copper-dependent halogenase that is unprecedented in Nature.
His comprehensive work on enzyme chemistry has led to coauthoring two books with Christopher Walsh, the late world-renown enzymologist and chemical biologist. He has received other prestigious awards, including the American Institute of Chemical Engineering (AIChE) Allan P. Colburn Award, and the Cope Scholar and Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penjen@g.ucla.edu.
