ChE’s Lauren Andrews Awarded $699,903 NSF Grant to Study How Microbes Communicate in the Root Zone of Plants

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Associate Professor Lauren Andrews, the Marvin and Eva Schlanger Faculty Fellow in the UMass Amherst Chemical Engineering (ChE) Department, has received a three-year, $699,903 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve understanding of how microbes communicate in the root zone to affect plant growth and nitrogen cycling under various conditions. The results of this work can be used to develop strategies for engineering these root-based microbial communities to enhance crop yield, plant hardiness, and efficient cultivation practices in many agricultural applications.

Andrews is also a faculty affiliate in the UMass Amherst Molecular and Cellular Biology Graduate Program, Biotechnology Training Program, and Institute for Applied Life Science. Among other honors, she has received an NSF CAREER Award, a Whiting Fellowship, the ChE Jeffrey M. Davis Teaching Award, and the College of Engineering Outstanding Teaching Award.

Andrews’ research group is developing programmable microbes and microbial communities to advance technologies for biomanufacturing, medicine, bioremediation, and agriculture. As she says, “To precisely control how a cell senses, remembers, and responds to its environment, we engineer synthetic gene networks and study their dynamics with high-throughput experimental and modeling approaches.” 

As Andrews explains the backstory behind the specific research being supported by her new NSF award, “Communication between microbes residing near the roots of plants can have profound impacts on the makeup of these microbial communities and the important biological process they perform, which can impact soil nutrients, plant growth, and biogeochemical cycling.” 

However, says Andrews, our understanding is quite limited when it comes to how specific microbial interactions affect the structure of these soil microbial communities and their functions. 

Her research addresses those limitations. As Andrews says, “This project aims to elucidate communication between bacteria by certain biochemicals called homoserine lactones that transmit signals in the rhizosphere [the region immediately surrounding plant roots] and determine their effects on the bacterial community that in turn impact nutrient cycling in the soil to support plant growth and health.” 

Specifically, Andrews’ project will study sorghum plants with growth-promoting bacterial communities. 

The planned experiments, as Andrews explains, “will utilize a multi-omics approach, bacterial strains with controllable signaling, and synthetic bacterial communities to study these microbial interactions in the root zone of sorghum during its growth. This project combines approaches from synthetic biology and systems biology to improve understanding of [cell-to-cell communication] in the rhizosphere.” 

“This knowledge,” says Andrews, “will provide the foundation for studying and predicting the breadth of bacterial intercellular communication in the rhizosphere and its effects on the root-associating microbes, plant growth, and nutrient availability in the soil.” 

As Andrews comments about the long-term implications of her NSF research, “This project will enhance U.S. national security and economic competitiveness by studying a promising plant system for production of food and forage on marginable soils and a versatile feedstock for biomanufacturing of biomass-derived products. This project will also train and help build the future STEM workforce from K-12 to postdoc through scientific education and research training.” (August 2025)