Research

What we do

We begin with a specific need and identify key protein targets to address it. We engineer proteins using directed evolution – a synthetic biology approach that enables rapid development of protein variants with novel or enhanced functions. This approach allows us to 1) identify beneficial changes to crop proteins that can be introduced via gene editing and 2) generate large datasets to train machine learning models that can predict the function of additional protein variants.

We focus on

• Resistance to pathogens and pests
• Resilience to environmental stress
• Photosynthetic efficiency

Recent Publications

• Directed Evolution of a Plant Immune Receptor for Broad Spectrum Effector Recognition
  Rim, Ellen Y.; Garrett, Oscar D.; Howard, Alexander J. et al., 2025, bioRxiv
  DOI: 10.1101/2024.09.30.614878

• Combining Directed Evolution with Machine Learning Enables Accurate Genotype-to-Phenotype Predictions
  Howard, Alexander J.; Rim, Ellen Y.; Garrett, Oscar D. et al., 2025, bioRxiv
  DOI: 10.1101/2025.01.27.635131

• Climate change challenges, plant science solutions
  Eckardt, Nancy A; Ainsworth, Elizabeth A; Bahuguna, Rajeev N et al., 2023, The Plant Cell,
  DOI: 10.1093/plcell/koac303

• Plant immunity: Rice XA21-mediated resistance to bacterial infection
  Ercoli, Maria Florencia; Luu, Dee Dee; Rim, Ellen Youngsoo et al., 2022, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
  DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2121568119