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Plant Genome Engineering and Plant Synthetic Biology
Plants are essential to the environment and human life. We rely so much on plants for food to eat, oxygen to breathe, clothes to wear, fuel to drive, materials to build, and medicine to cure. The growing world population demands for increased crop production. We believe plant biotechnology will play a critical role for supporting the world growth in a sustainable way. The Qi lab works on plant genome engineering and synthetic biology. We are interested in developing and improving tools for editing plant genome, fine-tuning plant transcriptome, detecting plant pathogens and sensing environmental stresses. By collaborating with other scientists, our long-term goal is to conduct translational research for breeding and engineering better crops to reduce carbon emissions, and ensure global food & nutrition security. 
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News:
4/30/2023: In collaboration with IDT, we have engineered probably the most efficient Cas12a nuclease for genome editing in eukaryotes. See the paper in Genome Biology 4/15/2023: Congrats to Yanhao and coauthors in developing base editors using Cas12a proteins. Check out these new tools at Plant Communications 11/18/2022: For the 3rd year in a row, Dr. Qi is a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher. Thirty UMD researchers are on the 2022 list. See UMD News. 10/14/2022: Congratulations to Simon and Aimee for their successful defense of the PhD theses! 5/20/2022: Our lab published a CRISPR-Combo plant genome editing system in Nature Plants, which is commented in News&Views, reported in UMD AGNR news. Congrats to all authors! 2/6/2022: Dr. Qi was recognized for his Genome Engineering work during the UMD Women's Basketball game vs Nebraska. Terps won 80-65! 9/14/2021: Congrats to Simon and coauthors for publishing a review on Nature Plants and a report on C-to-G editing tools in plant in Frontiers in Genome Editing. 9/9/2021: Thanks to FFAR for funding us with a collaborative research grant on promoting plant regeneration and genome editing, see AGNR News. 7/30/2021: AGNR News reported new funding from USDA and MII for supporting CRISPR research in our lab. 6/25/2021: Congrats to Changtian and coauthors for publishing CRISPR-Act3.0 in Nature Plants, featured in AGNR News, SeedWorld, and Talking Biotech Podcast. 4/30/2021: Congrats to our lab for winning UMD Invention of the Year Award in Life Science category, which was recently featured in AGNR News. 3/29/2021: Congrats to Yingxiao and coauthors for publishing Cas12a orthologs and multiplex Cas12a systems for plant genome engineering at Nature Communications, which was featured in AGNR news. 1/24/2021: Congrats to Simon and coauthors for publishing an exiting unrestricted plant genome editing toolbox at Nature Plants, which was commented in News&Views, and featured in AGNR news. |
