Plant adaptation: from fundamental mechanisms to resilient crops

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.

Our research currently focuses on two complementary directions:

Resurrection plants: mechanisms and regulation of extreme desiccation tolerance

Resurrection plants represent one of the most remarkable examples of plant plasticity, surviving the near-complete loss of cellular water and resuming normal growth upon rehydration. Using Craterostigma pumilum as a model, we investigate both the cellular mechanisms that protect tissues from extreme water loss and regulatory networks that activate, coordinate, and reverse these protective responses during dehydration and recovery. Our work spans multiple levels of biological organisation, from individual cells to tissues and the whole plant. We study how different organs deploy shared or distinct protective strategies, communicate during dehydration and recovery, and coordinate adaptive responses. We also investigate whether vegetative desiccation tolerance is achieved by reactivating regulatory programmes associated with seed maturation. To address these questions, we combine molecular biology, advanced physiological analyses, multi-omics approaches, computational biology, and genome engineering.

Engineering resilient and nutritious crops through metabolic detoxification

Many naturally resilient plant species possess exceptional nutritional value but remain unsuitable for agriculture because they accumulate toxic or anti-nutritional metabolites. We aim to overcome this limitation by identifying the metabolic pathways responsible for these compounds and using genome editing to eliminate them while preserving the traits that make these species valuable. Our primary model is grass pea (Lathyrus sativus), a drought-tolerant, protein-rich legume whose agricultural potential is limited by the neurotoxin β-ODAP. We are developing genome-editing strategies to produce toxin-free grass pea and are extending this approach to additional resilient crops while also improving their nutritional quality. These studies provide a framework for expanding the diversity of climate-resilient crops available for future agriculture.