Professor Eunyoung Chae

Background

Eunyoung Chae was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea and studied Biology as an undergraduate at Seoul National University. She moved to the US to undertake her Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology under the supervision of Prof. Vivian Irish at Yale University. After completing her Ph.D. research on flower development, Eunyoung moved to Germany to study natural variation at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, under the mentorship of Director, Prof. Detlef Weigel. Eunyoung started her first faculty position as Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore in Singapore. For the seven years of stay in Singapore, she ran the Plant Genetics lab as Principal Investigator and supervised post-graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. She joined the University of Oxford in 2025 as Associate Professor of Plant Pathology at the Department of Biology and as a Tutorial Fellow at Magdalen College.

Teaching

Eunyoung Chae teaches various topics in genetics and plant sciences at undergraduate and post-graduate levels, including plant immunity, host-microbe interactions, evolutionary and molecular genetics. 

Research Interests

Eunyoung has a broad interest in understanding how genetic variation within a species influences its adaptive potential in changing environments. Her current research focuses on autoimmunity in plants, specifically triggered by mismatched immune components. These autoimmune plants not only suffer from acute immune responses but also developmental defects due to the trade-offs between immunity and growth. Her work employs a multidisciplinary approach to investigate how plants finely regulate both immunity and growth simultaneously.

Selected Publications

• Lee, R.R.Q. and Chae, E. (2025) Monkeys at Rigged Typewriters: A Population and Network View of Plant Immune System Incompatibility. Annual Review of Plant Biology Volume 76 (accepted for publication).
• Kim, G†, Wan, W†, Kim N, Tan, YY, Charoennit N, Lee, RRQ, Liew YY, Ng SK, Zhang Y, Ji- Song, J* and Chae, E* (2025) Structure determinants of DANGEROUS MIX 3, an alpha/beta hydrolase, for triggering NLR-mediated genetic incompatibility in plants. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.28.620575v1
• Lee, RRQ, Cher WY, Wang J, Chen Y and Chae, E. (2023) Generating minimum set of gRNA to cover multiple targets in multiple genomes with MINORg. Nucleic Acids Research, https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkad142 (PMID: 36919598).
• Wan WL, Kim ST, Castel B, Charoennit N, Chae, E. (2021) Genetics of autoimmunity: an evolutionary genetics perspective. Tansley Reviews: New Phytologist 229(3):1215-1233 (doi: 10.1111/nph.16947) (PMID: 32970825). 
• Barragan CA, Collenberg M, Wang J, Lee RRQ, Cher W Y , Rabanal F A, Ashkenazy H, Weigel D*, Chae, E.* (2021) A truncated singleton NLR causes hybrid necrosis in Arabidopsis thaliana. Molecular Biology and Evolution 38(2):557-574. (doi: 10.1093/molbev/msaa245) (PMID: 32966577).
• Lee, R.R.Q. and Chae, E. (2020) Variation patterns of NLR clusters in Arabidopsis thaliana genomes. Plant Communications Vol 1, Issue 4; 13 July 2020 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xplc.2020.100089 (PMID: 33367252).
• Barragan CA, Wu R, Kim ST, Xi W, Habring A, Hagmann J, Van de Weyer A, Zaidem M, Ho W, Wang G, Bezrukov I, Weigel D*, Chae, E.* (2019) RPW8/HR repeats control NLR activation in A. thaliana. PLoS Genetics 15(7):e1008313 (PMID: 31344025).  
• Tran DTN, Chung EH, Habring-Müller A, Demar M, Schwab R, Dangl JL, Weigel D*, Chae, E.*. (2017) Activation of a plant NLR complex through heteromeric association with an autoimmune risk variant of another NLR. Current Biology Apr;27(8):1148-1160 (PMID: 28416116).
• Karasov T, Chae, E., Herman J, Bergelson J. (2017) Mechanisms to mitigate the trade-off between growth and defense. Plant Cell 29(4):666-680 (PMID: 28320784).
• Chae, E., Tran DTN, Weigel D. (2016) Cooperation and conflict in the plant immune system. PLoS Pathogens 12(3):e1005452 (PMID: 26986469).
• Chae, E., Bomblies K, Kim ST, Karelina D, Zaidem M, Ossowski S, Martín Pizarro C, Laitinen RA, Rowan BA, Tenenboim H, Lechner S, Demar M, Habring-Müller A, Lanz C, Rätsch G, Weigel D. (2014) Species-wide genetic incompatibility analysis identifies immune genes as hot spots of deleterious epistasis. Cell 159(6):1341-51 (PMID: 25467443).

*co-corresponding authors.