Ph.D., University of Calgary, Canada, 1994

Photosynthesis and carbon dioxide effects Plant molecular biology and biotechnology Molecular ecology and genetics of invasive plants

(1) Investigation of Rubisco biogenesis and functionality. Genetic engineering of more active Rubisco in crops and trees to sequester more carbon dioxide (CO2) to biomass (2) DNA-based biotechnology to generate value-added plants that produce medicines and more nutrients, or become more tolerate to environmental stresses such as drought (3) Application of CRISPR technology for more precise gene editing and targeted metabolic engineering for new traits in plants (4) Application of nanotechnology for more efficient delivery of DNA, RNA or proteins to plant cells (5) Molecular ecology study of genetic variation and mechanisms for invasive plants and habitat shift in the Florida Everglades wetland

Zhang X.-H., Brotherton J.E., Widholm J.M. (2015). Co-expression of the tobacco anthranilate synthase b subunit with its feedback-insensitive a subunit as a selectable marker that also markedly increases the free tryptophan content. In Vitro Cellular and Developmental Biology–Plant 51:564–570. Zhang X.-H., Keating P., Wang X.-W., Huang Y.-H., Martin J., Hartmann J.X., Liu A. (2014). Production of functional native human interleukin-2 in tobacco chloroplasts. Molecular Biotechnology 56:369–379. Webb J., Zhang X.-H. (2013). Organ disparate allocation of plasticity in phosphorus response as an underlying mechanism for the sawgrass-to-cattail habitat shift in Florida Everglades wetlands. International Journal of Plant Sciences 174:779–790. Li Q., Lin Y.-C., Sun Y.-H., Song J., Chen H., Zhang X.-H., Sederoff R.R., Chiang V.L. (2012). Splice variant of the SND1 transcription factor is a dominant negative of SND1 members and their regulation in Populus trichocarpa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 109:14699–14704.