Recoding regulation - Synthetic Expansions of Plant Metabolism

To survive in environments that they cannot simply walk away from, plants have evolved arsenals of novel chemical compounds and complex regulatory networks to fine-tune their metabolism and growth. In our lab, we aim to understand the genetic basis of these abilities and to develop technologies that enable us to rationally engineer them. We have developed approaches for investigating the intrinsic properties of regulatory sequences, examining how functional elements and their relative arrangements contribute to overall regulatory function. This enables us to elucidate gene regulatory networks, providing insights into how quantitative phenotypes emerge from network functions and identifying approaches for engineering quantitative traits. It also informs the computational design of synthetic promoters of predictable strengths enabling us to build synthetic genetic pathways and circuits. Finally, we use multiomics approaches to investigate plant chemodiversity and identify the genetic bases of novel bioactives. We combine knowledge of these biosynthetic pathways with our synthetic regulatory systems to enable plant-based bioproduction of molecules for agriculture and medicine.