Research Group Leader
Dr. Lars H. Kruse
Principal Investigator
Plant specialized metabolism, synthetic biology, enzyme discovery and evolution, natural product biosynthesis, metabolic pathway engineering, and heterologous pathway reconstruction.
Biography
Lars H. Kruse is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at Concordia University and leads the Kruse Lab in Applied Plant Synthetic Biology. His research focuses on understanding the biochemical and evolutionary basis of plant specialized metabolism and using this knowledge to engineer metabolic pathways and enzyme function.
His work asks how plants generate chemical diversity, how specialized metabolic pathways emerge and diversify, and how enzyme sequence and function shape the molecules plants produce. He has worked on several classes of plant specialized metabolites, including pyrrolizidine alkaloids and the complex flavonoid-derived natural product montbretin A, combining pathway discovery with biochemical characterization and metabolic engineering.
Research in the Kruse Lab integrates molecular biology, biochemistry, comparative genomics and transcriptomics, phylogenetics, heterologous expression, and mass-spectrometry-based metabolite analysis. Current research extends these approaches to questions in enzyme function, pathway evolution, unusual plant hydrocarbon metabolism, and the reconstruction and engineering of specialized metabolic pathways.
Lars is also a co-founder of PhytochemTalks, an international seminar series focused on plant specialized metabolism and phytochemistry.