Research Expertise and Interest
synthetic biology, plant biology, microbiology, evolutionary biology
Research Description
Patrick Shih is an assistant professor in the Department of Plant & Microbial Biology. His research is focused on two major areas of research: 1) developing synthetic biology approaches to enable complex engineering efforts in plant systems for applications in agriculture, sustainability, human health, and bioenergy and 2) leveraging genomics and molecular biology to investigate how the evolution of early microbial metabolisms (e.g., photosynthesis) shaped our planet over geological timescales.
In the News
Can Engineered Plants Help Make Baby Formula as Nutritious as Breast Milk?
Featured in the Media
“We made all three major groups of human milk oligosaccharides,” said Patrick Shih, an assistant professor in the Department of Plant & Microbial Biology. “To my knowledge, no one has ever demonstrated that you could make all three of these groups simultaneously in a single organism.” This research was posted on Berkeley News.