Research Area

My lab works on Environmental Control of Plant Growth and Development. We are striving to understand how molecular pathways integrate light and temperature signals. Our research is centered on delineating the mechanisms that allow plants to adapt to evolving growth environments and climate conditions.

View video on plant life from Professor Karen Halliday

Methods: Experimentation and mathematical modelling

 

Background

In higher plants, the need to sense and interpret environmental light cues in a meaningful way has led to the evolution of highly sophisticated molecular signalling networks. Controlling these networks are families of photoreceptors whose collective action shapes growth and development via a process that is referred to as photomorphogenesis. Our lab has shown that light receptor pathways play a pivotal role in temperature signalling. More recently we showed that the phytochrome light receptors a major regulators of plant biomass and control carbon resource allocation. Please look through the on-going projects in the lab:

 

See Global Map of Photobiology labs created by Dr Andrew Romanowski

you add your own lab if you are not represented

Current Projects

 

 

 

 

Redefining Plant Light Sensing: Phytochrome A Operates as a Canopy-Depth Sensor

Funding: The Leverhulme Trust

PDRA Dr Marissa Valdivia-Cabrera; Collaborator: Professor Ramon Grima, Biological Physicist, University of Edinburgh 

As plants grow in a fixed location they have to adapt to frequent changes in their surrounding environment just to stay alive. In nature, vegetation shade is a common obstacle, limiting access to light and the ability photosynthesise. This research project will delineate a new plant survival mechanism, that identifies the phytochrome A light-receptor as a canopy-depth sensor. Molecular methods, engineered synthetic tools and predictive mathematical modelling will be combined to elucidate the phyA signalling properties that underlie this dynamic response. The project will deliver a theoretical framework to understand environmental adaptation, which is applicable to natural ecosystems and agriculture.

 

Light Control of Translation 

Funding: BBSRC EastBio DTP

PhD student, Amy Newell; Collaborators: Dr Edward Wallace, RNA systems biologist, Dr Catharina Merchante, translational regulation expert, University of Malaga

This project builds on recent discoveries in the Halliday lab, that significantly expand our understanding of how phyB operates in the leaf. Our data point to a novel role for phyB in regulating the leaf cell division machinery, ribosome biogenesis and translation, key contributors to plant biomass. Collectively, these findings provide a new conceptual framework to interrogate phyB function.  The will test the central hypothesis that phyB regulates the basic translational machinery through transcriptional and post-transcriptional mechanisms.

 

Understanding Molecular Cross-Talk

Funding: The Darwin Trust 

PhD student, Mengke Zhou; Collaborator: Dr Sandy Hetherington, University of Edinburgh 

This project aims to delineate the molecular mechanisms through which the phytochrome photoreceptors communicate. The work will provide a better understanding of how adaptation to shade environments is accomplished at the molecular level. 

 

EDI projects....

Evidence Base

disruptive sySTEM change

Collaborators: Dr Sara Shinton, Dr Job Thijssen, Dr Gwenetta Curry, Dr Catherine Lyall, Dr Katie Nichol Baines

eBase is an EPSRC funded Inclusion Matters project, established to promote and execute a systems based approach to problems of equality, diversity and inclusion in STEM. Our ethos centres around examining the entire landscape of the issue. We want to move away from the ‘deficit model’ of approaching challenges of equality, diversity and inclusion in STEM careers. The solution should be focused on fixing the system, not the individual.