Topic 1: Metabolic engineering to increase crop nutritional value
Embedded Files
Metabolic engineering is the main application of synthetic biology in plant science and agriculture. Provitamin A carotenoid engineering is one focus of our group because vitamin A is essential for human health but many staple crops are lacking provitamin A. Natural tomato color variations (left) are used for the molecular study to reveal carotenoid biosynthesis and provide fundamental information for further metabolic engineering.
Seeds are rich in energy (oil, starch...) but often short in many micronutrients such as vitamins (Right). Another goal of our lab is to develop genetic engineering tools for next-generation seeds with balanced nutritional value.
Traditional seed engineering and screening are time consuming, which require the cultivation for multiple generations. Our lab is developing a calli system, which mimic seed embryo development, to predict genetic engineering outcome rapidly (Left).
Topic 2: Plant synthetic platform to produce products with pharmaceutic applications
Plants can not only provide foods, but are also green factories to produce products with high nutritional, pharmaceutical, or economical values. Our lab has established collaborations with scientists focusing on therapeutic proteins from Emory University. Currently we are developing plants as the synthetic platforms for the production of cancer-targeting peptides and IgG proteins.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse