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
- Elucidating the nanoarchitecture of the cell wall using 13C labelling/multi-dimensional solid state NMR (EMSL project 60798)
Non-JBEI Projects
- m-CAFEs SFA – using fabricated ecosystems to explore plant-microbe interactions across scales (led by Trent Northen and Adam Deutschbauer, LBNL)
Featured Publications
See Google Scholar profile for complete list.
- “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)
- “Lignin deconstruction by anaerobic fungi,” Nature Microbiology (2023)
- “Transcriptional and metabolic changes associated with internode development and reduced cinnamyl alcohol dehydrogenase activity in sorghum,” Journal of Experimental Botany (2022)
- “Progress and challenges in sorghum biotechnology, a multi-purpose feedstock for the bioeconomy,” Journal of Experimental Botany (2021)
- “Nanotechnology to advance CRISPR-Cas genetic engineering of plants,” Nature Nanotech (2021)
- “A grass-specific cellulose–xylan interaction dominates in sorghum secondary cell walls,” Nature Communications (2020) Link to news release