Contact Information
Research Areas
Research Description
Control of sugar allocation to improve crop yield or biomass for food and biofuels
Ongoing research in plant biology is essential for growing a sustainable bio-based economy, which encapsulates our vision of a future society with improved global food security and no longer wholly dependent on fossil fuels for energy and industrial raw materials. In plants, photosynthetic products are primarily generated in mature leaves. A better understanding of photoassimilates allocation could help to improve crop yields of food, fiber, wood and fuel for a sustainable bio-based economy. Despite decades of research on carbon allocation, especially sugar translocation from source leaves to sinks, such as root, fruit and seeds, the regulatory network that controls and coordinates allocation is largely elusive. My core interest is to unravel these regulatory networks as a basis for engineering and optimizing assimilates allocation using a combination of in vivo biochemistry, cell biology, molecular genetics, systems and synthetic biology.
Education
Postdoctoral Fellow, Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Plant Biology, Stanford, CA
Ph.D. China Agricultural University, China
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Professor, Plant Biology
Associate Professor, Center for Digital Agriculture, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
External Links
Recent Publications
Selvam, B., Paul, A., Yu, Y. C., Chen, L. Q., & Shukla, D. (2025). SWEET Family Transporters Act as Water-Conducting Carrier Proteins in Plants. Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, 65(7), 3697-3705. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.5c00110
Tang, M., Wang, J., Kannan, B., Koukoulidis, N. M., Lin, Y. H., Altpeter, F., & Chen, L. Q. (2025). Tonoplast sugar transporters as key drivers of sugar accumulation, a case study in sugarcane. Horticulture Research, 12(2), Article uhae312. https://doi.org/10.1093/hr/uhae312
Xia, C., Huang, J., Zhou, X., Payyavula, R. S., Lan, H., Chen, L. Q., Turgeon, R., & Zhang, C. (2025). The Crucial Roles of Phloem Companion Cells in Response to Phosphorus Deficiency. Plant, Cell and Environment. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/pce.15421
Chen, L. Q., & Tiwari, L. D. (2024). Dt1-SWEET10a partner: Photoperiodic control of seed weight in soybean. Molecular Plant, 17(6), 839-841. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molp.2024.04.011
Xue, X., Beuchat, G., Wang, J., Yu, Y. C., Moose, S., Chen, J., & Chen, L. Q. (2023). Sugar accumulation enhancement in sorghum stem is associated with reduced reproductive sink strength and increased phloem unloading activity. Frontiers in Plant Science, 14, Article 1233813. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2023.1233813