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 work developing and using multiscale models to describe plant processes including lignin biosynthesis, photosynthesis, and soybean growth and physiology.
