Research

Focus1. 

Plant Defense and Plant Immunity The most sufficient, economical, and eco-friendly disease management is to grow disease-resistant crops. Plant immunity and defense responses are the key to restricting the pathogen infection or spread. Using omics profiling, molecular biology techniques, Microscopy Methods and cell biology approaches, we aim to explore the key regulators involved in plant defenses. 

Focus 2. 

Epigenetic Regulation of Biotic Stress Reprogramming of gene expression during plant defense response is heavily regulated on the epigenetic level and generates epigenetic memory. SWP73A (an ortholog of the mammalian BRG1-Associated Factor 60), one of the core subunits of the SWI/SNF2 complex, acts as a negative regulator to suppress a group of plant Resistant (R) genes (Huang et al., 2021). This discovery reveals that the effector-triggered immunity response is heavily controlled on the epigenetic level. This research outcome pinpoints epigenetic regulators can be used as a master controller for plant defense against pathogens. One of our goal is to identify the conserved epigenetic mechanism and phenotypic evaluations of the model plants and project to crops for critical disease management. 

Focus 3. 

Develop Solutions for Crop Diseases Plant immunity and defense responses are the key to restricting the pathogen infection or spreading. Our ultimate goal is to dissect the plant defense mechanism and phenotypic evaluations to identify the master regulators for crop disease management. We aim to develop sufficient, economical, and eco-friendly disease management with novel tools and disease-resistant crops.