Welcome to the Gang Lab at Washington State University
Hemp research is a big focus of our lab!
Check out our WSU Hemp Research page for details!
DOE RACIPAC Project Starts!
Our DOE RACIPAC funded project, “Yardsticking the impact of biochar formulations on soil carbon durability and agronomic performance in hemp-based crop rotation systems“, has begun. We are excited about this project that brings together over a dozen researchers from WSU, University of Connecticut (UConn) and several industry partners (US Biochar Initiative, Oregon Biochar Solutions, Renovo Sustainable Products and Yard Stick PBC). The six-year project is evaluating the impact of integrating various biochar-based soil amendments and formulations along with hemp into major crop rotation systems in the Pacific Northwest, with the major focus being maintaining or increasing crop yield and quality while increasing durable carbon in the soil and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions of the cropping system. The project website will be up soon and will include a description of major project efforts. If you are interested in learning more, please contact Dr. Gang.
Project Manager for RACIPAC project joins us
We want to welcome Dr. Fatemeh Sefidkon as the new Project Manager for our DOE RACIPAC funded project. Dr. Sefidkon comes to us with extensive experience in running a highly successful research program and numerous grant funded projects. We are excited to have her as part of our team.
Undergraduate Internship positions available for 2025!
We have several Undergraduate Internships available for Summer 2025 (yes, we are announcing this early). In 2024, we supported a dozen interns across the western US, and in 2025 we hope to support close to the same number. We are working with the hemp industry to develop knowledge and tools needed to move that industry forward in Washington State and the Western US.
This is a joint effort with our partners at Oregon State University, UC Davis and University of Nevada, Reno, supported by two USDA NIFA SAS Grants. The first SAS Grant is supporting development of a hemp-based bioeconomy in the western US. The second SAS Grant, working more closely with our Tribal partners, focuses on hemp industry development on tribal lands.
The Interns can participate in either project and pursue any area of research related to hemp (from field to lab to economics to business development and beyond), either within one of the partner research institutions or with an industry or tribal partner. We have particular funding allocated in the second SAS grant to support Native American student interns. If you are interested in participating in this internship opportunity, please reach out to Dr. Gang.
Why “Cellular Metabolism and Engineering”?
The basic building block of life is the cell. Cellular functions are governed by regulatory pathways and networks that work at the gene, protein, metabolite and ultrastructural levels. Such networks are often integrated across all of those scales. Our laboratory focuses on understanding those regulatory processes that involve metabolism in one way or another. Although metabolism is integrated between tissues and organs in an organism, metabolic pathways themselves typically exist and function within individual cells. Thus, in order to understand how metabolism truly functions in an organism, we must understand how it functions in individual cells, and in varying cell types within an organism and at the tissue level.
Engineering metabolism, either through modern transgenic or gene editing approaches typically included in Synthetic Biology-based efforts, or through traditional breeding and mutagenesis, is a goal that has received much attention in the last two decades due to problems with fuel and food shortages that will be faced as world population continues to grow. For those efforts to be successful, we must understand not only how metabolism is structured but also how it is regulated and controlled. Again, that occurs at the cellular level. Thus, a major goal of my lab is to understand how metabolism is structured and regulated in individual cell types and how metabolism is connected between different cell types, either within an organism or between co-existing organisms.
Our lab has long worked in the area of plant biochemistry/metabolism, with a major focus on plant specialized metabolism, as plants are ideal systems to work with to understand single-cell processes. But we often work on other organisms as well, such as studying cancer development and inflammation processes in mammalian systems, investigating the interaction between major insect pests and the microbes that infect them or that they vector to other eukaryotes, determining how marine microbes produce novel bioactive compounds, and gaining an understanding of how single-celled algae regulate metabolism such that we can use that information to design changes in bioenergy and bioproduct development efforts.
We are also interested in how metabolism is integrated within the whole physiology of the body and how it is regulated and controlled within organs, such as the rhizomes and glandular trichomes in plants; the haemolymph, guts and salivary glands of insects such as psyllids; and developing cancer tumors and surrounding tissues in animals.
All of those efforts have two things in common: 1) they focus on metabolic processes and their regulation and 2) we use cutting edge technologies in our efforts and those project areas are excellent realms to apply such approaches.
Metabolomics, proteomics and transcriptomics, as well as comparative genomics, are commonly used tools in my laboratory to help us uncover regulatory processes at the cellular and tissue scales in the various organisms that we work with.
