Patrick Shih

Biologist Faculty Scientist

Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology

Comparative and Functional Genomics

Building: 978, Room 4464
Mail Stop: 978R4121
Phone: (510) 486-5764
PMShih@lbl.gov
http://shih-lab.ucdavis.edu

Research Interests

Much of the ingenuity of life has revolved around the evolution of metabolic pathways, which has unlocked novel chemistries and expanded the molecular repertoire of nature. In particular, plants have been especially successful through the evolution of many unique and relevant metabolisms, ranging from synthesis of specialized compounds that can be used as pharmaceuticals (e.g., morphine, artemisinin) to broad processes that drive our planet’s elemental cycles (e.g., photosynthesis). As a result, life as we know it could not exist without plants. Given the scale and utility of agriculture, plants offer a unique platform to address many imminent challenges facing society. My research focuses on developing the foundational knowledge needed to innovate, deploy, and engineer new traits in plants using synthetic biology. Beyond biotechnological applications, these approaches can also be utilized to provide more sophisticated tools to improve our basic understanding of plant systems.

Selected Publications

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JBEI’s Patrick Shih Awarded Packard Fellowship

October 15, 2020

Patrick Shih, the Joint BioEnergy Institute’s (JBEI) Director of Plant Biosystems Design in the Feedstocks Division, has been awarded a 2020 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation. Shih is an assistant professor in the Department of Plant Biology, College of Biological Sciences at UC Davis, one of JBEI’s six academic research partners.

Study Finds ‘Missing Link’ in the Evolutionary History of Carbon-Fixing Protein Rubisco

October 8, 2020

In a study appearing in Nature Plants, researchers from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and Berkeley Lab report the discovery and characterization of a previously undescribed lineage of form I rubisco – one that the researchers suspect diverged from form I rubisco prior to the evolution of cyanobacteria. The novel lineage, called form I’ rubisco, gives researchers new insights into the structural evolution of form I rubisco, potentially providing clues as to how this enzyme changed the planet.

The work was led by Patrick Shih, a UC Davis assistant professor and the director of Plant Biosystems Design at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), and Doug Banda, a postdoctoral scholar in his lab.

Synthetic Pathways Turn Plants into Biofactories for New Molecules

September 30, 2020

Scientists at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) are using synthetic biology to give plants the ability to create molecules never seen before in nature. New research led by Patrick Shih, director of Plant Biosystems Design at JBEI, and Beth Sattely of Stanford University describes success in swapping enzymes between plants to engineer new synthetic metabolic pathways. These pathways gave plants the ability to create new classes of chemical compounds, some of which have enhanced properties.