Biology and Biotechnology

Pamela J. Weathers

Professor

Weathers

Office: Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center, 4022
Phone: +1-508-831-5196
Fax: +1-508-831-5936
weathers@wpi.edu

Educational Background

Research & Teaching Interests

Plant cell and tissue culture; aeroponics; bioreactors; plant secondary metabolism; controlled environments for plant growth; bioprocess design; downstream processing

Research

Dr. Weathers’ research focuses on 3 main areas: plant secondary metabolism, bioreactor development, and production of biodiesel using algae.

Plant Secondary Metabolism: We especially focus on terpene biochemistry in Artemisia annua, a plant that produces the important antimalarial drug, artemisinin. This drug also is effective in the treatment of many other diseases including some tropical parasitic diseases like schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis, African sleeping sickness, and Chagas disease, against a number of viruses including the Hepatitis viruses, and against many tumor lines. Unfortunately the plant makes little of this therapeutically important compound and the drug is in desperately short supply so efforts in our lab to increase drug yield are focused on simple treatments of whole plants for filed production, metabolic engineering, and fundamental studies to improve overall understanding of terpene biosynthesis in general.

Bioreactor Design and Development: A reliable supply of any secondary metabolite produced by tissues in a bioreactor, at a reasonable cost, requires large-scale culture of high yielding tissue with high productivity rates. A second area of Dr. Weather’ research is the development of bioprocesses and especially the mist bioreactor for culturing plants, transformed roots, and animal tissues. She invented the gas-phase mist bioreactor which has shown special promise for culture of 3-D tissues and is the focus of most of our studies in this area.

Algal Production of Biofuels: This a new area of research and is aimed at larger scale systems for cost effective production of algal produced oils that can be converted to biodiesel. We have projects both at WPI and down in Arkansas that are testing different types of devices to reduce cost while improving yield of both algal biomass and lipid/oil production.

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