Thijs Stegmann, secretary

About my research

Annual drought is becoming increasingly frequent and less predictable. Shortage of water at any point during a plant’s life cycle is detrimental, causing yield losses or growth delays. To survive and thrive periods of these suboptimal environmental conditions, plants use their roots to scavenge for water. Their root system architecture determines how much of the soil is available to them to scavenge in. Therefore, a robust and adaptable root system might be part of the key to a plant capable of withstanding water shortages for longer with less detriment to its growth. To this end,  I study how Arabidopsis thaliana has adapted its root systems to survive across different climates with varying levels of water availability. I hope to find genetic adaptations that allow for changes in the root system architecture and how these changes in root system architecture can alleviate drought stress during a plant’s life cycle. To do so, I am doing a large-scale GWAS in rhizotrons, combined with transcriptomics to find out which genes are responsible for drought responsive changes in a plant’s root system architecture.