Photosynthesis is vital for life but the proteins involved in photosynthesis are vulnerable.  In this work, a co-chaperoning mechanism of chlorophyll and carotenoid biosynthetic enzymes is revealed, providing a promising target to generate climate resilient crops.  Sun et al., Molecular Plant 2023 

The seeds were engineered by CRISPR/Cas9 and multi-gene stacking to improve both provitamin A (orange color) and vitamin E content and increase provitamin A stability during seed storage, which adds to the toolbox for crop nutritional quality improvement.   Sun, Zhu et al., aBiotech. 2021

The greening of seedling is a critical stage of plant development: they need to be prepared for the photosynthesis, but not too vigorous: otherwise they will suffer from severe photo damage. This research proposed a molecular tuner of the seedling greening process .   Sun et al., The Plant Cell. 2019

Carotenoids are health-beneficial products mainly synthesized in plants and some microorganisms. Chromoplast is the site for bulk carotenoid storage in plants. This study proposed a mechanism of the chromoplast duplication. This finding will inspire future synthetic biology efforts to create more chromoplasts. Sun et al., Molecular Plant 2020