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Broad Concepts Driving our Research
Fluctuations of a number of different environmental factors including the levels of
specific nutrients, the intensity of the incident irradiation and temperature will alter the
growth rate of photosynthetic organisms. The metabolic state of the organism must be
tuned to this altered rate of growth; the cell must sense its capacity for growth (e.g. through
intracellular redox levels and/or accumulation of reactive oxygen species) and use that
knowledge to evoke a new cellular homeostasis. Under extreme conditions, when essentially all growth stops, dramatic changes may be observed in pigmentation, activities of various metabolic processes and cell morphology. The major goal in my laboratory is to examine how photosynthetic organisms perceive and respond to their environment, and to define how these responses are controlled and how they help the organism survive adverse conditions. While my laboratory emphasizes the basic biological aspects of acclimation processes (and is very mechanistic in its orientation), such studies have a strong potential to yield information that will extent the range of environments in which specific plants can grow, which could be very important from an agronomic perspective. We are also taking both a genomic and evolutionary approach to study acclimation mechanisms used by photosynthetic organisms. A diagrammatic view of the organisms under study and the stress conditions examined in some of our studies is given in the figure below.
The specific projects in which we are currently involved (some of which are large collaborative efforts) are