Laboratory for Molecular Ecology

Flowers have evolved several traits to attract their pollinators, such as many insects and birds. The goal of this project is to unravel the ecological performance of floral traits in nature by measuring phenotypic differences between wild-type plants and mutant lines. We are conducting integrated kinetic analyses of plants' transcriptomes, metabolomes, and phenomes with a high degree of resolution in flowers (Yuri Choi, Hyeonjin Kim, Eunae Park, Hangah Lim). Plants produce thousands of secondary metabolites. To understand the origin and diversification of secondary metabolites, the identification of biosynthetic genes is crucial. The goal of this project is to identify the whole biosynthetic pathway of plant metabolites using single-cell RNA sequencing (Hyeonjin Kim, Eunae Park, Taein Kim). Many insect herbivores attack crops in the field, causing serious damage to human agriculture system. To build a more sustainable agriculture system, we should know more about plant-insect interactions; how insects find their host plants in nature, how plants defend themselves against herbivore attacks (Sungjun Choung, Jongbu Lim), and how crops lost their defensive weapons during breeding. The genome editing tools enable us to study the gene function of non-model organisms. The goal of this project is to develop a simple and efficient platform for plant genome editing. Plants are living factories that produce a wide range of valuable compounds. In this study, we demonstrate that large-scale production of diosgenin can be achieved through targeted gene mutations. Our findings show that precise genetic modification can reprogram plant metabolic pathways, enabling plants to serve as efficient platforms for producing high-value natural products. We uncovered the transcriptional switch