Boyuan Wang, Ph.D.

Boyuan Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.  He received his B.S. in Chemistry from Peking University and his Ph.D. from The Rockefeller University under the supervision of Dr. Tom Muir. Boyuan dedicated his undergraduate research to synthetic organic chemistry. Thereafter, he has been committed to unraveling molecular mechanisms of bacterial signaling for more than a decade. In graduate school, Boyuan became a dual expert in synthetic protein chemistry and biochemistry. Using this expertise, he was able to reconstitute, in a test tube, intercellular communication (quorum sensing) in Staphylococcus aureus, which controls virulence of this major commensal pathogen. Detailed biochemical analysis revealed unexpected physiological checkpoints of virulence induction, which provided new insights for anti-virulence drug design.

Boyuan then moved on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship in Dr. Michael Laub’s Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he harnessed photo-crosslinking chemistry to identify new signaling targets of guanosine tetraphosphate (ppGpp), a starvation-induced second messenger. ppGpp is a key physiological regulator universally conserved in the bacterial kingdom and is required for intracellular infection and antibiotic persistence in many pathogenic species. Boyuan showed that ppGpp directly inhibits most purine nucleotide synthesis pathways in Escherichia coli and that this inhibition contributes to growth recovery of the bacterium by permitting the synthesis of two proteogenic amino acids following the nutrition downshift. Boyuan also discovered the first synthetase of ppApp, the adenosine variant of ppGpp. Intriguingly, Pseudomonas injects this protein into neighboring bacteria, killing them by deadlocking their metabolism.

In 2021, Boyuan joined the faculty of UT Southwestern Medical Center. The Wang Lab is broadly interested in using chemical biology approaches to address fundamental problems in bacteriology. At the same time, The Wang Lab will continue the effort of elucidating how ppGpp drives dormancy and antibiotic persistence in diverse bacterial organisms.