Abstract:
Food security, energy security, and environmental sustainability in a world with a growing population and a changing climate are current challenges facing the global community. Genetic and metabolic engineering of crops to improve photosynthetic efficiency, carbon and nutrient allocation, and nutrient and water use efficiencies in food and bioenergy crops are potential avenues to address these challenges. Mathematical models of biological systems can help identify gaps in our current understanding of a biological process and can be used to explore strategies for engineering plants for improved traits. Plants have developed complex regulatory strategies to adapt to changes in their environments. As such, they are regulated at multiple levels of biological organization (e.g., genes, RNA, proteins, metabolites, physiology, etc.). Multiscale models that integrate across levels of biological organization are important to capture and predict emergent properties that are not seen when just modeling individual biological scales. In this seminar, I will discuss my past and current research developing and using multiscale models to describe plant processes including lignin biosynthesis, photosynthesis, and soybean growth and physiology.
Bio:
Megan L. Matthews holds a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University, where she developed a multiscale model of lignin biosynthesis in poplar trees. Megan came to the University of Illinois as a postdoctoral researcher to develop multiscale crop models for the RIPE and Crops in silico projects. Megan joined the CEE Department as an Assistant Professor in January 2021. Here, her research will focus on developing multiscale plant models that integrate information across multiple levels of biological
organization, and using those models to (1) explore the impacts of a changing environment on plants and (2) identify engineering strategies for improving plant development and growth.
