There’s a famous quote attributed to the eminent scientist Richard Feynman: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
Those eight words are a driving force for Patrick Shih, an associate professor of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley. Shih’s work is primarily in synthetic plant biology, which is striving to create therapeutic compounds, better nutrition and even new forms of fuel through new biological understanding.
“What we’re trying to do with biological systems is tear them down, build them back up and demonstrate that we understand how they tick,” Shih explains in this 101 in 101 video, a series from UC Berkeley that challenges campus experts to distill their work into just 101 seconds.
Shih sees a future where agriculture can become a factory, making critical compounds at scale for humanity’s needs.
“All of our food, fiber and fuel come from plants,” says Shih. “If you have this ability to just tweak them, manipulate them, engineer them for new purposes, all of a sudden we have the agricultural infrastructure to build new things.”
By introducing genes that don’t normally exist in plants, Shih and his colleagues aim to turn them into a bioreactor or biofactory capable of producing new drugs and therapeutics. Shih’s lab has already successfully demonstrated that synthetic plant biology can be used to grow a critical component of human breastmilk that hasn’t been available in baby formula.
Today, his lab focuses on developing innovative solutions to challenges in bioenergy, health and agriculture, while also creating new technologies to make plant engineering faster and more reliable.
“Berkeley is arguably ground zero for a lot of synthetic biology and genome editing, genome engineering,” Shih says. “To be able to establish a lab that’s focused on plant synthetic biology, there’s no better place than Berkeley, really, to be doing this.”
Watch more 101 in 101 videos featuring UC Berkeley faculty and experts here.