Green Bioproducts: Discovery and Engineering of Plant Natural Products
What Is a CURE?
Are you a first year or transfer CBS student curious about research? Consider enrolling in the Zerbe lab’s Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) lab course!
Since spring of 2025, our lab has taught Green Bioproducts: Discovery and Engineering of Plant Natural Products, a course designed to give students hands-on research experience in the field of plant biochemistry. By joining our CURE, students can expect to ask scientific questions, collaborate with peers on meaningful research projects, and learn skills that make them more competitive for future research opportunities.
As part of our CURE course, students will contribute to a map of chemical diversity of plants on campus. By collecting plant samples from the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden and extracting their metabolites, we aim to build a database that highlights the vast diversity of plant chemicals and their roles in both the environment and society.
Course Description
Plants are nature’s master chemists. They produce thousands of small chemicals to ward off insects and pathogens, to recruit pollinators and beneficial microbes, and to adapt to environmental stress. We use many plant-natural products as medicines, fragrances, cosmetics, biofuels, and more. In this hands-on CURE lab, you can learn how to use state-of-the-art metabolomics technologies to identify plant natural products. Applying what you’ve learned, we’ll explore how to use plants as a platform to metabolically engineer genes, enzymes, and entire pathways to produce plant natural products. This workflow, used in major biotech companies, is quickly gaining acceptance worldwide as the way to produce bioproducts at scale.
Map of Arboretum Chemical Diversity
Explore the UC Davis Arboretum’s plant chemical diversity through this interactive map! Each species highlighted below was collected, extracted, and analyzed by students in our CURE course.