Plants, being sessile organisms, have evolved thanks to extensive signaling pathways that allow them to decipher environmental cues and adapt deftly their metabolism and development to ever-changing environment.
A variety of signal transduction mechanisms, which transduce the perceived external signal to the inner cellular components for most befitting responses must be heavily based on, if not originate in the prime locations for energy input, such as the chloroplast, and mitochondria. Yet, we know very little about the signaling within the organelles and its integration in the whole-cell and whole organism signaling.
Some of the most unique biochemical processes on earth with great impact not only for the life of plant but for the life on earth as we know it – namely, the capturing of the light energy into chemical and transforming CO2 into organic compounds, while releasing vital O2 – occur in the chloroplast. Such an extensive biochemical and structural organization has a fundamental impact on the plant’s utilization and distribution of energy, plant biomass, growth, and development, as well as plant responses to abiotic and biotic stresses, therefore it needs to be tightly perceived, and tuned in accord with the environmental energy input and stimuli.
Our lab’s objective is to study signal transduction pathways, their compartmentalization and their crosstalk within and across the organelles and integration within the plant cell and organism as a whole.
Our current research focus is on signal transduction localized to the plastids (chloroplast) because these are crucial for plant utilization and distribution of energy, plant biomass, growth, and development, as well as environmental and biotic responses.
We use both computational and experimental biology methods to achieve our goal at understanding better the vital importance of the organelles’ signaling networks and their communication with the rest of the cell.