Education

Ph.D., Plant Breeding, Genetics & Biotechnology, Michigan State University, 2015

M.Sc., Plant Biology, Iowa State University, 2012

B.Sc., Biochemistry/Molecular Biology, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, 2008

Research Interests:
The overall mission of my lab and the Plant Transformation Core Research Facility (PTCRF) is to develop new technologies for crop genetic improvement and support collaborative research towards engineering regenerative and resilient crops for food, biofuel and specialized metabolite production. Our approaches towards accomplishing this mission include:

• Developing novel traits in important crop species
• Applying new genetic engineering and genome editing tools
• Improving protocols for tissue-culture based transformation and tissue-culture free genome editing

Publications:

Google Scholar publication list 

• Butler NM, Carlson AT, Starker C, Voytas DF (2025). Viral-mediated delivery of morphogenic regulators enables leaf transformation in Sorghum bicolor (L.). BioRxiv, 2025.02.15.637725. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.02.15.637725
• Zhu X*, Chen A*, Butler NM*, et al. (2024) Molecular dissection of an intronic enhancer governing cold-induced expression of the vacuolar invertase gene in potato. Plant Cell. 36: 1985-1999. *authors contributed equally to this work
• Butler NM, Jansky SH, Jiang J (2020) First generation genome editing in potato using hairy root transformation. Plant Biotech. J. 18: 2201-2209.
• Butler NM, Baltes NJ, Voytas DF, Douches DS (2016) Geminivirus-mediated genome editing in potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) using sequence-specific nucleases. Front. Plant Sci. 7: 1045. *Highly cited
• Butler NM, Atkins PA, Voytas DF, Douches DS (2015) Generation and inheritance of targeted mutations in potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) using the CRISPR/Cas system. PLoS ONE 10: e0144591. 

*Highly cited