We are interested in how plants sense and respond to their environment and how these signals regulate plant development. The research emphasis of the lab is to try and understand these processes at the cellular level. We combine advanced microscopy approaches such as confocal microscopy with biochemistry and molecular biology to address a wide range of biological questions:

• 1. How do plants sense and respond to abiotic stresses?

  2. How do plants respond to the spaceflight environment?

  3. How could plants cope with growing on the Moon

Right: Arabidopsis plant having its long distance systemic signaling system being activated by addition of the plant wound signal glutamate. 

After being put on hold in 2020 due to COVID travel restrictions TIC-TOC is now ready for a launch!  It's due to launch to the ISS on  SpaceX dragon Crew Resupply Mission - 22 this summer (2021)! Watch this place for latest data from this program. The legacy GMO AVP-OX technology demonstration may identify new mechanism to enhance plant resistance to drought and salinity stress. 

The movement of  water in space is no longer dominated by gravity the way it is on the Earth. Molecular forces such as hydrogen bonding, surface tension an capillary action come in to play makking water want to sticj to surfaces and creep over them. For a plant in space, this can cover them in water. On the Earth, plants experience a very similar issue when they are flooded. Studying how plants generate signals about flooding stress on Earth then helps understand how to adapt plants to spaceflight. Arkadipta Bakshi in the lab has recently shown how  mutants in a calcium transporter called CAX2 can yield flooding resistant plants that are more resilient to growing in spaceflight.

Plants are going to be our essential companions on long-duration space missions. They make food, replenish the air, purify the water and simply being around something green and alive adds much to crew well-being. Could we reduce the costs of growing plants in a base on the Moon by using the Moon's 'soil'. This 'soil' is called regolith and is largely crushed rock with none of the organic copmponents so critical to fertile soils on Earth. There are a lot of unknowns here. How would water act at the 1/6 gravity of the Moon? What would be the effects of space radiation? One major challenge is how would the plants deal with the poor nutrient availability of the lunar regolith. In a NASA-funded project, we are asking how the symbiotic nitrogen-fixing microbes often associated with beans and peas might help mitigate some of these nutrient-related problems.

Right: A video showing the prevalence of microbes in a built environment. 

Project MANGO is a collaboration coordinated by the UW Gilroy AstroBiology team with both the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) "Interplanetary Protection Team", the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and the NASA Ames GeneLab team. This collaboration has lead to the incorporation off the ISS microbiome into the MGNfy database making it comparable to Earth and ocean microbiome projects. 

We've developed Educational material for high school and undergraduate students who are interested in plant, genetics and / or bioinformatics. 

This review provides an overview of the challenges plants face in spaceflight