Jenny Mortimer

Research Focus

Sugars are one of the fundamental building blocks of life. Whether glycosylating proteins or lipids, or as complex polysaccharides, they are essential to the health of the cell. However, unlike DNA and protein, these complex sugar molecules are built without an apparent template. An enormous number of combinations are possible due to the different starting molecules (monosaccharides) and the myriad ways they can be linked together. We know that assembly is carefully controlled by the organism, since serious pathologies can result when this process goes wrong. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how this happens.

My research focus is to understand the mechanisms that drive glycan assembly. This includes making the substrates (the nucleotide sugars), transporting them to the correct compartment in the cell, and synthesizing the polysaccharides. Questions about how these processes are regulated, as well as how the completed molecules are exported and arranged to form the wall, are essential if we want to predictably engineer biomass to produce the fuels and materials that we will require in the future. Alongside this, we are building the modeling and synbio tools to allow us to predictably and precisely build engineered cell walls both in model systems but also in field-ready dedicated biomass crops.

Projects

• Identifying and characterizing novel cell wall glycosyltransferases
• Developing new methods for sorghum transformation and cell culture

Non-JBEI Projects

• BER-funded m-CAFEs SFA – using fabricated ecosystems to explore plant-microbe interactions across scales (led by Trent Northen and Adam Deutschbauer, LBNL)
• Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space
• ARC Training Centre in Future Crop Development
• ARC Research Hub in Engineering Plants to Replace Fossil Carbon
• NCRIS/Bioplatforms Plant Synthetic Biology Australia (Adelaide node)

Publications

See Google Scholar profile for complete list.

• “Turbocharging fundamental science translation through controlled environment agriculture,” Trends in Plant Science (2025)
• “Through the lens of bioenergy crops: advances, bottlenecks, and promises of plant engineering,” The Plant Journal (2025)
• “Engineered lignin composition in Brachypodium distachyon modulates the root-associated microbiome,” biorxiv (2025)
• “Evaluation of computational tools for predicting CRISPR gRNA on-target efficiency in plants,” biorxiv (2025)
• “Putative rhamnogalacturonan-II glycosyltransferase identified through callus gene editing bypasses embryo lethality,” Plant Physiology (2024)
• “A large sequenced mutant library–valuable reverse genetic resource that covers 98% of sorghum genes,” The Plant Journal (2024)
• “Elongated galactan side‐chains mediate cellulose‐pectin interactions in engineered Arabidopsis secondary cell walls,” The Plant Journal (2023)
• “Genome editing of a rice CDP-DAG synthase confers multipathogen resistance,” Nature (2023)

ORCID

• 0000-0001-6624-636X