Plant Biology

The new system streamlines the process of fermenting plant sugar to fuel by helping yeast survive industrial toxins.

If we imagine the cell as an orchestra, with many musicians who each have a small part to play, then what conducts all of these musicians and keeps them organized and harmonized as they play a symphony?

Experience a multimedia story exploring Whitehead Member Jing-Ke Weng’s work. Weng’s laboratory is combining the ancient wisdom of traditional plant-based global medicine with genomics, analytical chemistry, and synthetic biology in order to advance our understanding of plant metabolic evolution and impact a new era of natural products-based therapeutics.

A proposed project would provide a way to store carbon indefinitely in the tissues of specially engineered plants.

By learning from nature without overtaxing it, Whitehead Institute Member Jing-Ke Weng aims to help develop potent new drugs for a plethora of medical problems while addressing some of the environmental concerns of typical drug development.

Maintaining food security in the face of climate change is a complex, multifaceted problem of global importance, and so researchers are tackling it from many different angles. Whitehead Institute Member Mary Gehring is starting to work on ways to engineer crops that can better survive the effects of climate change and continue to produce high yields with high nutritional value.