Rhee Lab: Impact on Society

The world’s population growth, compounded by climate change, demands more agricultural output and new crop breeds that are adapted to suboptimal conditions and more resilient to biotic and abiotic challenges. Many traits that improve agricultural productivity have been underpinned by plant metabolism. Marker-assisted breeding, metabolic engineering, and synthetic biology have fueled the development of improved crop metabolic traits. For example, micronutrients such as provitamin A and folates have been successfully bred and engineered in staple crops. In addition, transporter engineering has led to increased starch content and tuber yield in potato and rice blight resistance in rice. These examples underscore the importance of plant metabolism in improving crops.

Plant research's vital contribution to advancing science, technology and engineering in our society is undisputed, including seminal advances in biological energy capture and conversion, immunity, circadian clock function, hormone action and mechanisms of epigenetics. Today's innovations in systems biology, sensors and biosensors, data science and artificial intelligence, gene editing, precision breeding and microbiome position us to make unprecedented discoveries in plant science.

STANFORD & MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“Stanford sits on the ancestral land of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Ohlone people. Consistent with our values of community and inclusion, we have a responsibility to acknowledge, honor, and make visible the University’s relationship to Native peoples.”
"We acknowledge that Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. We affirm Indigenous sovereignty and hold Michigan State University accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples."