Research Focus
The Plant Biosystems Design group focuses on developing the foundational knowledge and
technologies needed to innovate, deploy, and engineer new traits into plants using synthetic
biology approaches. Specifically, the team is interested in manipulating plant metabolism in
order to optimize plant development and biomass characteristics for sustainable energy-crop
and bioenergy production. In order to efficiently engineer plants, tools and techniques will be
developed to expedite and implement biotechnological applications in agriculturally relevant
crops.
Projects
- Developing synthetic biology tools to enable more complex, targeted, and sophisticated engineering efforts in plants
- Stacking traits into bioenergy feedstocks for improved yield, biomass, and sustainability
- Designing and engineering plants for the production of target compounds directly from photosynthesis
Featured Publications
See Google Scholar profile for complete list
- “Engineering plant synthetic pathways for the biosynthesis of novel antifungals,” ACS Central Science (2020)
- “Novel bacterial clade reveals origin of form I Rubisco,” Nature Plants (2020)
- “Design of orthogonal regulatory systems for modulating gene expression in plants,” Nature Chemical Biology (2020)
- “Accumulation of high-value bioproducts in planta can improve the economics of advanced biofuels,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020)
- “Towards a sustainable bio-based economy: Redirecting primary metabolism to new products with plant synthetic biology”, Plant Science (2018)
- “Gene stacking of multiple traits for high yield of fermentable sugars in plant biomass”, Biotechnology for Biofuels (2018)
- “Plant synthetic biology – A brief history and outlook on plant engineering”, Chemical Engineering Progress (2017).
- “A robust gene stacking method utilizing yeast assembly for plant synthetic biology”, Nature Communications (2016)
- “Biotechnology and synthetic biology approaches for metabolic engineering of bioenergy crops”, The Plant Journal (2016)