Julia Kubanek

Professor, School of Biological Sciences

Research in the Kubanek lab takes an integrated approach to understand how organic small molecules function as chemical cues in ecological interactions – working from the molecular to the community level. We use ecological insights about how marine organisms use chemical cues to guide our discovery of novel natural products for drug discovery. Funded by an International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups project by NIH since 2004, we have isolated, performed full structure elucidation, and evaluated the pharmacological activities of ~50 novel natural products including >10 new carbon skeletons from Fijian marine organisms. Many of these novel natural products exhibit selective activities against human cancer cell lines and some can be used as molecular probes for understanding drug-target interactions.