Ho-Ming Chen

Ho-Ming Chen

Associate Research Fellow

Code to Crop

Code to Crop

Dr. Ho-Ming Chen is a plant computational biologist whose research explores how plants regulate gene expression to balance growth and defense. By mining large-scale biological data, her work aims to accelerate smart breeding strategies that support sustainable agriculture and global food security. 

Our team seeks to translate molecular codes into next-generation crop solutions, enabling precision breeding for durable disease resistance with reduced growth–defense tradeoffs. 

We investigate how gene expression is shaped by copy number variation, fine-tuned at the post-transcriptional level, and ultimately translated into plant disease resistance and growth phenotypes. By integrating high-throughput sequencing of diverse RNA signals, whole-genome variation analysis, computational biology, and precision genome editing, we decode the regulatory mechanisms and phenotypic outcomes of gene expression and apply these insights to the breeding of better crops.