Faculty |
Lei Lu,PhD

Lei Lu

Assistant Professor

Lei Lu received B.S. and Master in pharmaceutical science from Wuhan University. He completed his Ph.D. under the guidance of Prof. Lloyd Smith at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, concentrating on advancing Mass Spectrometry-based proteomics methodologies. Lei did his postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California-San Francisco, working in Prof. William DeGrado's lab. His primary research focuses on de novo protein design, with a specific emphasis on developing proteins that can bind small molecules such as drugs or metals. He has co-authored 11 manuscripts in Science (Accepted), Nature Methods, Biochemistry, etc, in the areas of de novo protein design and mass spectrometry-based proteomics and the tools he developed have been widely used in biomedical research around the world.


Research interest

The long-term research objective is to develop de novo protein design methodologies, ultimately aiming to create practical artificial proteins for developing innovative therapeutic approaches. Our research group conducts both computational and experimental studies. Details could be found in the Group website:https://lonelu.github.io

The main research directions include:

1.De novo design of binding proteins for drugs, metals, glycans, and peptides

We focus on protein-molecule interactions, employing database search methods combined with novel protein design tools for designing binding proteins.

2.Computational method development and application for enzyme design

Designing enzymes to catalyze specific chemical reactions through new databases and developing deep learning approaches

3.Development of new proteomics technologies and algorithms

Creating novel proteomics technologies based on protein/enzyme design, apply to limited protease proteomics and proximity proteomics etc, ultimately enabling innovative drug screening and biomarker discovery.

Selected Publications

1.

Lu L, Gou X, Tan S, Man S, Yang H, Zhong X, Gazgalis D, Valdiviezo J, Jo H, Wu Y, Diolaiti M, Ashworth A, Polizzi N, & DeGrado W. (2024) De novo design of drug-binding proteins with predictable binding energy and specificity. Science, 384, 106-112.

2.

Lu L, Scalf M, Shortreed M, Smith L. (2021) Mesh fragmentation improves dissociation efficiency in top-down proteomics. Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, 23;32(6):1319-25.

3.

Lu L#, Riley N#, Shortreed M, Bertozzi C & Smith L (2020). O-Pair Search with MetaMorpheus for O-glycopeptide Characterization. Nature Methods, 17, 1133-1138. (# co-first authors)

4.

Lu L, Millikin R, Solntsev S, Rolfs Z, Scalf M, Shortreed M, & Smith L. (2018). Identification of MS-cleavable and noncleavable chemically cross-linked peptides with MetaMorpheus. Journal of Proteome Research, 17(7), 2370-2376.