I am a plant physiologist. My research interests is on the role of the chloroplast in plant growth and development, focusing on plant responses to changing light environments. My work encompasses plant responses to light at multiple levels – from canopy and whole plant dynamics to the molecular/cellular level – including screening mutant populations for gene discovery. In the past, I have primarily worked in agricultural settings but my work here at Worcester State University will focus more on natural ecosystems and model systems.
Why do some plants have the ability to thrive in both sun and shade environments while other, even closely related species, are relegated to only sun or shade environments? My lab group is trying to tease apart this question using greenhouse grown plants as well as tree canopies. We use a combination of approaches including whole plant physiology to examine differences in light movement across leaves, cell biology to look for changes in internal leaf and cell structure, and molecular biology to look for differences in gene expression between shade tolerant and sun plants.
To support the work on shade plants, I have also started a plant transformation project. This will be used to test the function of genes identified in screens of shade tolerance.
Despite all of the genomes that have been sequenced, the function of 40% of those genes is unknown. To truly understand how an organism responds to its environment, more work needs to be done to annotate these genes. We are focusing on elucidating the function of a small, plastid-targeted protein that is highly expressed in petals and sepals of Arabidopsis thaliana.
