Fay-Wei Li
Duke University, NC·Plant Science & Agriculture
Crops need nitrogen, and the world uses more than 100 million tons of synthetic fertilizer each year to supply it, contributing to greenhouse gases and to runoff that causes harmful algal blooms. Some microbes can instead fix nitrogen, converting nitrogen gas from the air into a form plants can use.
- Fields
Plant Science & Agriculture
Ecology & Evolution
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
plant-microbe symbiosis
cyanobacteria
nitrogen fixation
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Determine the chemical structure of the hormogonia-inducing factor (HIF), the diterpenoid signal the hornwort Anthoceros punctatus secretes to recruit cyanobacteria, by purifying it from scaled-up cultures and analyzing it by NMR spectroscopy.
- Test the role of a candidate HIF biosynthetic gene cluster, which switches on under nitrogen starvation, by expressing it in E. coli, yeast and Nicotiana benthamiana and by making CRISPR-Cas9 knockouts in Anthoceros.
- Test whether the liverwort Blasia pusilla and the flowering plant Gunnera perpensa independently evolved similar symbiotic signals, using comparative metabolomics.
- Isolate new Gloeobacteria cultures, a rare early-branching cyanobacterial lineage, from high-latitude and high-altitude habitats using targeted fieldwork and real-time nanopore sequencing.
- Characterize new Gloeobacteria strains by genome, phylogeny, morphology and physiology to formally describe new species and clarify the early evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis.
More about the research
Cyanobacteria, photosynthetic bacteria that partner with many unrelated plants, are one such group. The research here centers on cyanobacteria: how plants recruit them as nitrogen-fixing partners, and how the hidden diversity of an ancient cyanobacterial lineage sheds light on the origin of oxygen-producing photosynthesis.
Why it matters
Identifying the signal plants use to recruit nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria could eventually help engineer crops that host their own nitrogen-fixing partners. Such crops could cut farmers' reliance on synthetic fertilizer, along with the greenhouse gases and algal-bloom runoff it causes. Cataloguing Gloeobacteria clarifies how oxygen-producing photosynthesis first evolved. It also documents polar microbial diversity before climate change erases these habitats.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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University of Maryland Eastern Shore, MD·Biochemistry
Identify the biosynthetic building blocks of manzamine A's beta-carboline unit and five-ring core using isotope incorporation experiments in Micromonospora sp. M42.
Liana Burghardt
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Identify which legume host traits support which rhizobial bacteria by analyzing plant characteristics and field samples from legumes, using traditional and AI-enabled image and statistical analysis.
Reed Stubbendieck
Oklahoma State University, OK·Microbiology & Immunology
Culture Dolosigranulum pigrum from nasal swabs and test its inhibition of multiple Staphylococcus aureus strains with co-culture plate assays under conditions mimicking the human nose.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
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