Research

Plants cannot escape environmental change. Instead, they rely on an extraordinary capacity for developmental, physiological, and metabolic plasticity that allows them to survive and adapt to fluctuating and often extreme conditions. Understanding the molecular basis of this plasticity is a central theme of our research.

We investigate how plants sense environmental challenges, reprogramme cellular and tissue functions, and coordinate adaptive responses across the whole organism. By combining molecular genetics, biochemistry, multi-omics approaches, computational biology, and genome editing, we seek both to uncover the fundamental mechanisms that underlie plant adaptation and to translate these discoveries into strategies for developing crops suited to a changing climate.

Can cells adapt to entirely new conditions through a learning-like process? And is it only how much an environment changes that matters for evolving populations, or also how fast? We study these questions in yeast, where the environment can be tightly controlled and evolving populations followed over time. We built an experimental platform that couples environmental conditions to gene expression in microfluidic devices, effectively letting populations control their own conditions, and use it to study the emergence of learning in populations, the repurposing of genes to new tasks and the role of cheaters and contributors in adaptation. In a second line of investigations, we use barcoded populations to study how the rate of environmental change shapes adaptive dynamics.