Xuehua Zhong, a professor of biology and the Dean’s Distinguished Professorial Scholar, has received several major federal grants to advance her pioneering work in plant epigenetics, the molecular processes that regulate gene expression without altering DNA.

Projects led or co-led by Zhong have recently received more than $9 million in funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Department of Energy (DOE) — a remarkable record at a time of tightening federal budgets.

“Xuehua has been on an upward trajectory with many high-impact studies since joining WashU,” said Ram Dixit, a professor and chair of biology. “Her phenomenal success with grants underscores the promise of her internationally recognized research program in plant epigenetics.”

Federal agencies have increasingly recognized epigenetics as a promising frontier for improving crop growth and resilience, with potential applications in both food security and biofuel production. Zhong has been a central figure in these efforts, helping shape the next generation of “smart” agriculture technologies.

“Scientists have been studying the genetics of crops for many decades, but epigenetics — especially epigenome editing and engineering — is a new area of research for crop improvement,” Zhong said. “Funding agencies are looking to support impactful research and promising technologies, and they know that my lab has a track record of producing high-impact results.”

Zhong is a co-principal investigator of a five-year, $5.8 million DOE grant focused on the epigenetic control of photosynthesis and carbon energy in sorghum, a promising biofuel crop. The project combines systems-level biology, genome engineering, artificial intelligence, and computational approaches to create plants that can optimize photosynthesis and carbon fixation across changing environmental conditions.

“We’re looking for ways to create ‘environmentally smart’ sorghum plants that can adjust their photosynthesis to different growth conditions,” she said. “Importantly, we will be testing our work directly in the field, not in a laboratory. Lab-to-field applications like this could be a big step forward.” Other co-investigators on the project include Ru Zhang and Tessa Burch-Smith of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center.

Zhong is also leading a three-year $1.1 million NSF grant to study how a weed called thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) senses nutrient availability and other aspects of a changing environment. “We study that plant because it’s easy to grow and has a short life cycle, but we believe the findings will apply to other economically important crop plants, including corn and soybean,” she said.

She is a co-principal investigator of another NSF project, a three-year, $1.6 million study of how photosynthetic cells in green algae build epigenetic “memories” of heat exposure. “We’re hoping to be able to create a sort of vaccine system that could help plants survive heat stress, an increasingly important threat to crops,” Zhong said.

In August, she received $850,000 over two years to continue her Maximizing Investigators’ Research Awards (MIRA) project from the NIH. The NIH project seeks to understand the molecular mechanisms behind of epigenetic gene regulation in plants.

“I’m grateful for all of the support and excited by the opportunity to continue these projects,” said Zhong, who joined WashU in 2022 after serving as an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. “WashU has provided me an outstanding platform to build the collaborations that make my research thrive. I’m fortunate to work closely with colleagues in the biology department and at the Danforth Plant Science Center. We couldn’t do this work on our own.”