Christine Queitsch’s research focuses on engineering stress resilient plants by manipulating gene expression and protein stability. To understand plant gene regulation, she has pioneered chromatin accessibility mapping, transcription factor network analyses, and single-cell genomics approaches. To enable the design of synthetic regulatory elements, she has developed the massively parallel reporter assay Plant STARR-seq and applies machine learning to hundreds of thousands of putative regulatory elements derived from crop genomes. To increase the stability of plant proteins, she collaborates with David Baker on designing stable versions of thermolabile proteins in photosynthesis and testing these protein designs in various plant expression systems. For this project, Queitsch will apply her expertise and tool sets to engineer duckweeds for space travel. Duckweeds are very small, extremely fast-growing and protein-rich aquatic plants that can grow in wastewater, making them uniquely suitable for long-term space travel.