Description:

Elizabeth Sattely, PhD

Stanford University

Title: Discovery and Engineering of Plant Chemistry for Plant and Human Health

Abstract: Plants are some of the best chemists on the planet and produce an impressive array of small molecules. We are inspired by the fact that humans have become extraordinarily reliant on plant-derived molecules for food, medicine, and energy. However, remarkably little is known about how plants make these molecules, limiting our ability to engineer and optimize plant metabolic pathways. New plant genome sequences and synthetic biology tools have enabled three research areas under investigation in my lab: 1) Identifying the minimum set of enzymes required to make known plant-derived molecules and non-natural derivatives through metabolic engineering, and 2) discovering new molecules from plants, and 3) developing new strategies to enhance plant fitness. In this talk, I will describe some of our recent efforts to accelerate the discovery of complete plant pathways for known and novel molecules, not only in the model plant Arabidopsis but also in non-model plants.