In the future, the range of bioproducts produced from plant biomass will be immense. The starting material, the polysaccharides and lignin of the plant cell wall, are complex. The goal of our lab is to understand polysaccharide biosynthesis and use this knowledge to deliver optimized biomass for the bioeconomy. Our work focuses on sorghum (a biomass crop in the US), with some work in switchgrass, poplar and Arabidopsis (a model plant, which we use for initial experiments). We use a combination of systems and synthetic biology, protein functional characterization, and biophysics (solid state NMR) to explore polysaccharide biosynthesis at multiple scales. In parallel, we are developing new methods to optimize sorghum transformation to accelerate the application of synthetic biology tools to this promising bioenergy crop. We are also interested in how alterations to the cell wall can affect plant-microbe-environment interactions.
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)
Featured 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)
- “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)