Joseph’s research takes a synthetic bio logy-based approach to identify the molecular mechanisms that underly auxin signaling, a plant growth hormone involved in many aspects of development. After completing his bachelor’s degree, Joseph worked at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center as a space crop production intern where he evaluated the performance of various crops in spaceflight conditions. Outside of the sciences, Joseph has a passion for the visual arts and storytelling. Currently, art has become more of a relaxing creative outlet while his main passion is in the sciences.
Joseph completed his undergraduate studies in Environmental Science, Plant Bio logy at NC State University and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in horticulture at Virginia Tech within the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences in the College of Agriculture Life Sciences.
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Challenges caused by population growth and climate change necessitate the development of custom crop varieties via bioengineering. However, a lack of intimate knowledge of target genes within developmental hormone pathways creates a major bottleneck in the implementation of many biotechnology-based strategies. Auxin, a crucial plant growth regulator, has a wide influence on growth, but its signaling pathway's transcriptional specificity is not fully characterized. It is in part mediated by a complex network of interactions between ARF transcriptional activator and Aux/IAA transcriptional repressor protein families. The modularity of these interactions is thought to play a role in this specificity, but it is yet to be explicitly demonstrated. We have created a synthetic interaction system to mimic and isolate these complex interactions, substituting protein interaction domains with animal kingdom orthologs. Structural predictions suggest that the exogenous domain dimers closely resemble that of the wild type. A Yeast-2-Hybrid assay confirms that these interactions are discrete and specific. Furthermore, in plant protoplasts, we demonstrate that our synthetic proteins function as expected in a plant cell-based system. This system allows for the analysis of specific auxin-mediated transcriptional responses, a crucial step in the development of tools to address many of the crop-production challenges facing humanity.