Niklas F. C. Hummel

This paper refactors the Agrobacterium tumor-inducing plasmid into a minimal set of genes for plant and fungal transformation, demonstrating a bottom-up engineering approach.

The paper shows that function can be conserved in transcriptional activation domains without sequence conservation through evolutionary turnover of key residues.

The paper develops a toolkit of chromatin regulators with cross-kingdom functionality for programmable transcriptional repression and activation in eukaryotic cells.

The paper identifies and validates activation domains in non-transcription factor proteins across Arabidopsis and yeast, discovering novel coactivators and universal genetic parts for synthetic biology.

The paper characterizes two glutarate-sensing transcription factors in Pseudomonas putida and develops biosensors to detect glutarate flux for metabolic engineering.