Angela Chen

The Chen lab is focused on developing new sustainable nanomaterials and biological strategies for regulating microbiomes that will combat and mitigate climate change by improving plant resiliency for food security and bioenergy, reducing agricultural chemical usage, and enabling bioremediation. As such, we use a combination of synthetic biology, genetic engineering, plant pathology, microscopy and other materials characterization techniques for our experiments.

We are extremely interested in plant-microbe and microbe-microbe communication and how nanotechnology can be leveraged to control these interactions. One example is developing and using nanomaterials to facilitate RNA interference-based control of plant pathogens such as Botrytis cinerea, Colletotrichum acutatum, and Phytophthora infestans on relevant plant species. Other efforts include investigating how plant and microbial-derived extracellular vesicles are used for targeted cargo delivery to control recipient phenotypes. Understanding native targeting and recognition mechanisms for extracellular vesicles in agricultural contexts will allow us to engineer improved nanomaterials with specific properties. Finally, we are also interested in using microbes or microbial communities that can produce nanoparticles for bioremediation applications focused on metal removal and recovery.