People

Jing-Ke Weng


Professor of Chemistry, Chemical Biology, and Bioengineering
Affiliated Professor of Chemical Engineering
Inaugural Director of IPHI

📧 jingke.weng@northeastern.edu
🌐 Weng Lab
📍 EXP 550E

Question & Approach

Plants have evolved a remarkable diversity of specialized metabolites that enable their survival in challenging environments and provide valuable therapeutic compounds for human medicine. The Weng lab investigates the fundamental question of how these complex natural product biosynthetic pathways arise and evolve, while seeking to harness this knowledge for sustainable production of important plant-derived medicines and development of novel screening platforms. Their work spans multiple areas including the discovery and engineering of medicinal plant biosynthetic pathways, the evolution of enzyme function in specialized metabolism, and the interface between plant chemistry and human health.

The Weng lab employs a highly interdisciplinary approach that integrates genetics, genomics, biochemistry, structural biology, and synthetic biology to elucidate plant specialized metabolic pathways at multiple scales. They develop and apply cutting-edge tools in metabolomics, low-quantity structural elucidation, and bioinformatics to study non-model medicinal plants. Their research focuses on several key areas: resolving unknown biosynthetic mechanisms of diverse plant natural products, engineering plant cyclic peptide production systems for drug screening, exploring phytochemical-receptor interactions in food allergy and pain, and developing sporopollenin-based technologies for carbon sequestration. By combining fundamental discovery with translational applications, the lab aims to both advance our understanding of plant chemical diversity and leverage this knowledge to address challenges in medicine, agriculture, and climate change.

Bio

Jing-Ke Weng is the Inaugural Director of the Institute for Plant-Human Interface (IPHI), a Professor of Chemistry, Chemical Biology, and Bioengineering, and an Affiliated Professor of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University. His research focuses on understanding the origin and evolution of plant specialized metabolism, and how to harness plant biochemistry to advance human health and sustainability on planet Earth. He was a member of the Whitehead Institute and served as an Assistant and Associate Professor of Biology at MIT from 2013 to 2023. He received his B.S. (2003) in Biotechnology from Zhejiang University, and his Ph.D. (2009) in Biochemistry, from Purdue University. He was a Pioneer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2009-2013). Dr. Weng has won numerous awards in his career, including the Beckman Young Investigator Award (2016), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (2016), Searle Scholar (2015), Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences (2014), American Society of Plant Biologists Early Career Award (2014), and Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science (2013). Dr. Weng is a co-founder of the Asian Young Scientist Fellowship, which provides funding support to early-career scientists in Asia to carry out creative and transformative research, and he serves as a member of its steering committee. He is also a co-founder of DoubleRainbow Biosciences, Galixir, and Neuma Technologies, and has served as a scientific advisory board member for Phylos Bioscience, BGI, and Inari.

Key Publications

Higgins KW, Itoigawa A, Toda Y, Bellott DW, Anderson R, Márquez R, Weng JK. Rapid expansion and specialization of the TAS2R bitter taste receptor family in amphibians. PLoS Genet. 2025;21: e1011533.

Kim CY, Mitchell AJ, Glinkerman CM, Li F-S, Pluskal T, Weng J-K. The chloroalkaloid (−)-acutumine is biosynthesized via a Fe(II)- and 2-oxoglutarate-dependent halogenase in Menispermaceae plants. Nat Commun. 2020;11: 1–7.

Li FS, Phyo P, Jacobowitz J, Hong M, Weng JK. The molecular structure of plant sporopollenin. Nat plants. 2019;5: 41-46.

Pluskal T, Torrens-Spence MP, Fallon TR, De Abreu A, Shi CH, Weng J-K. The biosynthetic origin of psychoactive kavalactones in kava. Nat Plants. 2019;5: 867–878.

Torrens-Spence MP, Bobokalonova A, Carballo V, Glinkerman CM, Pluskal T, Shen A, et al. PBS3 and EPS1 Complete Salicylic Acid Biosynthesis from Isochorismate in Arabidopsis. Mol Plant. 2019;12: 1577–1586.

Kersten RD, Weng J-K. Gene-guided discovery and engineering of branched cyclic peptides in plants. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018;115: E10961–E10969.


Full list of publications on Google Scholar

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