Fresh Faces in CEA Spaces: Xiaonan Shi
June 5, 2024 In our 2024 Fresh Faces in CEA Spaces series, we’re talking to young professionals in CEA about their work and where they see the industry going in the future. CEAg World recently chatted with Xiaonan Shi, a Postdoctoral Research Scholar who recently earned her PhD in speed breeding at North Carolina State University.
Xiaonan Shi
CEAg World: What first interested you in horticulture, then later, CEA?
Xiaonan Shi: I knew I wanted to study agriculture a long time ago because I grew up on my grandparents’ farm. After high school, I did undergrad at China Agricultural University and majored in agronomy with focus on agriculture. I really enjoyed a research project I worked on as an undergrad, so I decided I wanted to go to graduate school.
I applied to schools here in the U.S. and got into North Carolina State University for my Master’s. That’s when I first encountered Controlled Environment Agriculture. One of the main projects I worked on was indoor strawberry propagation, and I did a greenhouse study on that.
Because of my research on strawberry propagation, I saw great potential in CEA in terms of growing plants indoors and limiting the outdoor environmental pressures such as disease and pests. I also saw how it affects crop yield and the productivity of growers.
CEAg World: Could you tell us more about your research in speed breeding?
Xiaonan Shi: Speed breeding is a promising field that integrates CEA into plant breeding. It‘s super important for modern agriculture because speed breeding is where we apply CEA tools like regulating different environmental cues to shorten the breeding period from seed to seed.
But traditionally, that’s why some plant breeding programs are extremely long, because you grow plants outside in the field and you can’t have year–round growth. And on top of that, it takes longer for some plants to reach the flowering stage. So, by playing around with environmental conditions, you can speed up the whole process to where you can grow the plants within a year.
Shi’s Research at North Carolina State University | Photo: Xiaonan Shi
CEAg World: Could you tell us what you’re working on right now?
Xiaonan Shi: Right now, I’m looking at plants on a cellular level and seeing how cells respond to different environmental conditions. I’m currently [working] with a forestry biotechnology group doing genome editing on different tree species, and we’re trying to establish a new system using single–cell suspension culture.
CEAg World: What would you say is your biggest accomplishment in CEA so far?
Xiaonan Shi: I would say my biggest accomplishment is the interdisciplinary project I did during my PhD. The main focus of my PhD dissertation was I worked on a plant transformation lab researching transgenic plants with molecular tools.
I implemented different CEA strategies in the transformation process. The project is highly interdisciplinary because we looked for alternative ways of doing plantation culture, such as auto-traffic, where we grew plants without adding any additional sugar. So, these plants had to rely on photosynthesis to produce enough carbohydrates to support their growth and development.
CEAg World: Where do you see the CEA industry going in the future?
Xiaonan Shi: To begin with, there will be the integration of CEA with traditional crop production. I think for high–value crops, there is much more room for us to improve and push past the limit of the crops that are already growing in CEA because we have the ability to.
I think there’s a lot of potential in speed breeding and we’re only at the beginning. Crop species are pretty limited right now because people haven’t tried [speed breeding] with different crops. I think there’s a lot more work to come and even though every crop is different, we’ll accelerate the process for each one. If we can really push to shorten the breeding cycle, we’ll see more cycles within the year. I think CEA can do a lot to make that happen by optimizing growth conditions as well as efficient transplant production.
CEA can also play a facilitating role in genetic improvement of crop species by accelerating the process of obtaining genetically edited plants. To elaborate, there is potential of utilizing the knowledge and practice of CEA in the plant regeneration process from edited cells and tissue. For instance, the increasing air change rate in tissue culture can speed up shoot growth and development. In the scenario of genome editing or genetic modification, plant regeneration can be quite lengthy. I think we can obtain edited shoots faster by implementing a higher air change rate.