Physiology of photosynthesis and its interactions with environmental drivers such as light, water, temperature and CO2
Research Area
All terrestrial plants suffer from the same contraption where in order to take up carbon, water must be lost to the atmosphere. We are targeting several major gaps in our understanding of how plants achieve an effective balance between water loss and carbon gain. Additionally, photosynthetic gas exchange has traditionally been studied under steady state conditions. Although this facilitates ease of analysis, natural environments are anything but constant. To address this discrepancy, we are defining constraints to photosynthesis and carbon assimilation under dynamic conditions.
Project Interests
Projects to study regulation of light harvesting and photoprotective mechanisms across the green lineage and how these may relate to acclimation and adaptation. With public availability of sequencing data across a diverse range of species rapidly expanding, now is the time to leverage these resources and increase our understanding beyond the level of a few model organisms.
Projects using stable isotope discrimination during photosynthesis and recorded in plant biomass as a natural marker of the balance between water use and carbon gain. The ratio between stable isotopes of carbon (13C/12C) in carbon dioxide changes during plant gas exchange in ways that are informative of restrictions to water loss and carbon gain. Recent work suggests that post-photosynthetic fractionation associated with respiration and assimilate export biases the record of this proxy in plant biomass, in an ontogenetic way. I would be interested to develop projects that aim to experimentally test these suggestions and/or estimate their impact on use of isotopic proxies across the fast vs slow leaf economics spectrum.