Given the scale and utility of agriculture, plants offer a unique platform to address many imminent challenges facing society. 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
- Designing and engineering plants for the production of target compounds directly from photosynthesis
- Improving Plant Transformation
- Developing high throughput screening platforms in plants
Featured Publications
- “A substrate-multiplexed platform for profiling enzymatic potential of plant family 1 glycosyltransferases,” Nature Communications (2025)
- “Quantitative dissection of Agrobacterium T-DNA expression in single plant cells reveals density-dependent synergy and antagonism,” Nature Plants (2025)
- “Binary vector copy number engineering improves Agrobacterium-mediated transformation,” Nature Biotechnology (2025 )
- “Systematic identification of transcriptional activation domains from non-transcription factor proteins in plants and yeast,”Cell Systems (2024)
- “The trans-regulatory landscape of gene networks,” Cell Systems (2023)
- “Structural plasticity enables evolution and innovation of RuBisCO assemblies,” Science Advances (2022)