Chemical Biology Approaches for studying Small-Molecules Transport and Function in Plants

The remarkable progress in genetics and molecular biology has profoundly transformed our ability to manipulate the functions of genes and proteins in plants with unprecedented spatial and temporal specificity, providing the means to extract the roles they play in distinct cells and cellular compartments. In stark contrast, due to lack of comparable methods, our ability to manipulate small-molecules, endogenous or synthetic, has remained largely unchanged over decades; they can only be applied indiscriminately to the whole plant, or at the organ level at most, and always from the outside. By globally applying small-molecules to the plant the spatial and temporal context in which they often act is lost.

We are developing and implementing a set of mutually exclusive approaches to control and manipulate the bioactivity of endogenous and synthetic small-molecules with cellular and sub-cellular specificity in whole, live plants. Specifically, we are developing chemical tools such photocaged and enzyme activatable molecules of interest in plants and employ them in conjunction with imaging techniques to visualize and explore their transport and function in planta.