Center for
Genome Engineering

Plant biology

Center for Genome Engineering

Plant team

Plants produce various metabolites to protect themselves from biotic and abiotic environmental stresses and to attract pollinators. Analytical chemistry, plant specific ecological information, and molecular biology will be essential to understand the role of metabolites in plants because most metabolites are induced from specific environments and produced with various synthetic pathways. Although plant molecular biology has been developed using model plant system such as Arabidopsis thaliana, rice or maize the combination of next generation sequencing (NGS) technology and genome editing power paves a wide-open road to the study of the non-model plant system.

We have seen a lot of breakthroughs in biological studies with the help of model plant research but various limitations at the same time. We will leverage such limitations by focusing on various natural wild species and crop species, where we can maximize the possibility to combine all information accumulated in ecology and agricultural study.

Plant team in the center for genome engineering will find the answer to the question raised when we observe natural plant species and crop species with the ecological, molecular, and chemical point of view.