Angelovici Lab

Seeds feed the world. They are a primary source of amino acids (AA) for both people and livestock, yet the seeds of our staple crops fall short in several essential amino acids, and decades of classical breeding and transgenic engineering have struggled to fix this without sacrificing seed quality or germination vigor. The reason is that, while the underlying biochemical pathways are well mapped, we still know surprisingly little about the amino acid network as a whole: the developmental constraints that shape it, the drivers of amino acid levels and composition, how it responds to a changing environment, and how it ultimately contributes to plant fitness and adaptation.

That gap is what drives our work. Our central aim is to uncover the metabolic and genetic mechanisms behind the AA network’s response to cellular and environmental demands, and to illuminate the evolutionary forces and constraints that shaped it.
To get there, we map the genetic architecture of amino acid levels and composition by tapping into natural variation, and we tease apart how amino acid homeostasis is established and maintained, especially in seeds. Using multiomic dissection of seed storage protein mutants in maize and Arabidopsis, we characterize the potential nodes maintaining amino acids homeostasis. We are especially fascinated by how translation efficiency and regulation may act as the integrator that balances the network’s many competing demands into stable, resilient homeostasis.

Our toolkit brings together GWAS and classical linkage mapping with molecular and genetic approaches, functional genomics, and bioinformatics.

Ultimately, we aim to model the genetic and metabolic responses of the AA network across diverse environments, paving the way for seed biofortification and new opportunities in molecular farming.