Joe Earle, council member

About my research

Plants must adjust their growth rate or pace to ensure use of limited resources (sink strength) fits the environmental conditions (source capacity). For plants, growth and pacing concerns the production rate of new leaves, hence determining sink strength. Pace-control is a complex, highly plastic trait that involves a plethora of temporal changes across genetic, metabolic and physiological levels. For example, in harsh environments plants must drop their pace so sink strength aligns with the reduced source, and ensuring resource homeostasis. By adjusting pace, plants may adopt conservative or risky strategies to either avoid starvation or maximize resources, thus pacing is intrinsically linked to carbon metabolism and distribution throughout the plant. My PhD aims to dissect the mechanisms plants utilize to adjust their pace upon a drop source strength. I am currently focused on tracking carbon allocation/investment patterns throughout A. thaliana as well as exploring bi and perennial species that are able to utilize greater carbon storage flexibility than annuals. I will subsequently use transcriptomic approaches to start disentangling the underlying gene regulatory network in A. thaliana. Thus, hopefully bringing the highly plastic and resilient crops of the future one step closer.