Seung Yon (Sue) Rhee is a Michigan State University Foundation Professor in the departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Plant Biology, and Plant, Soil, and Microbiology and Director of MSU’s Plant Resilience Institute. Dr. Rhee’s group strives to understand how plants adapt and acclimate to changes in temperature, water availability, or nutrient limitation. They are also interested in decoding biological traits from molecular to organism scales. In addition, they are developing translational research programs involving engineering resilience and metabolic traits in bioenergy and cover crops. Dr. Rhee has extensive leadership, mentoring, and research experience and has trained over 160 scientists, many of whom have achieved leadership positions in academia, government, and industry.
Cell biology Meets Metabolism: Knowledge Gaps and Opportunities in Metabolic Cell Biology
Advances in our understanding of plant metabolism have underpinned many traits that improve plant productivity. To quantify, model, predict, and engineer desirable metabolic traits such as to maximize biomass production under suboptimal conditions or reallocate biomass from carbohydrates to lipids or from shoots to reproductive tissues, we must decode the complex metabolic networks. We developed an integrated pipeline that combines computational prediction, metabolic network modeling, and high-throughput experimental testing using state of the art technologies in live confocal imaging, plant transformation, and metabolic network construction to create a high-quality subcellular map of small molecule metabolism in plants. Using this pipeline, we have identified subcellular locations of hundreds of enzymes and metabolic pathways in Sorghum bicolor, an important and versatile crop for food, feedstock, and bioenergy globally. We also discovered a novel metabolon (physically connected metabolic pathway enzymes) for rhamnose biosynthesis, which we call the rhamnosome, in Arabidopsis thaliana. Rhamnosome formation is required for UDP-rhamnose synthesis and organ development. Overall, our study demonstrates a novel role for biomolecular condensation in metabolism and organismal development, and provides further support for how organisms have harnessed this biophysical process to regulate small molecule metabolism. In this talk, I will describe our pipeline, initial exciting and surprising results, future directions, and potential impact of our work in plant biology, engineering, and biotechnology.