Ellen Rim
Assistant Professor
Chemical Engineering
"Plants face an existential threat from climate change, in the form of disease, droughts, and heat, among others. My lab works on enhancing plants to respond to this onslaught of challenges.
I have always been fascinated by how life's building blocks create remarkable variety in form and function. But I only considered plants at the end of graduate school. A talk by Pat Brown (a Stanford biochemist and founder of Impossible Foods) led me to consider sustainable food production in a changing climate. I then learned about how technological breakthroughs in the mid-1900s led to higher yielding cereal crops that lifted many from poverty. One such crop, a rice variety with 30% greater yield, helped lift postwar Korea from hunger to abundance in one generation – that of my parents.
Unfortunately, the incredible natural diversity that allows plants to flourish in different environments has been lost in many crops. In my lab, we generate diversity in plant proteins and simulate evolution to find the most successful versions. We focus on helping crops withstand increasing disease outbreaks and extreme weather. For example, plants have immune proteins that recognize some pathogens but not others. Can we engineer proteins that recognize and protect against a broader range of crop pathogens? Protein aggregation is part of plants' response to heat and pathogen infection. Can we fine-tune these aggregating proteins to enhance crop resilience to stress? Plants are master chemists, generating energy from sunlight, yet many proteins involved in photosynthesis are inefficient and sensitive to heat stress. Can we engineer better photosynthetic proteins? Through our work, we hope to contribute to food security and sustainable agriculture while learning the rules connecting protein sequence, structure, and function."
