Photosynthetic "omics"
As climate change drives arid land expansion, there is urgent need to understand how life has responded to past climatic shifts. For 500 million years, land plants have evolved diverse and elegant adaptations to extreme environments – especially for thriving when water is scarce. I focus on photosynthetic adaptations, known as carbon concentrating mechanisms (CCMs), which boost CO2 concentrations in photosynthetic cells relative to the environment. CCMs increase carbon-, nutrient-, and water-use efficiencies under water-limited and nutrient-poor conditions. The two most common CCMs, C4 photosynthesis and Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM), use a common set of genes in contrasting patterns: C4 concentrates carbon by spatially separating initial carbon capture from ultimate fixation between two specialized cells, whereas CAM temporally separates capture from fixation between night and day within the same cells. C4 and CAM each have dozens of evolutionary origins that together represent ~10% of vascular plants. This massive evolutionary convergence provides unparalleled natural laboratories for comparative studies of the genomics and gene regulatory evolution of stress responses and complex traits.
Modularity and integration in a rare form of photosynthesis
Portulaca (Portulacaceae) are one of only a few lineages able to use multiple CCMs simultaneously. Understanding how multiple photosynthetic systems are regulated and integrated has implications for the emergence of complex traits.
Scaling up single-nuclei RNAseq
Single-cell and -nuclei "omics" are revealing the diversity of patterns that make up composite systems. These methods are not designed for large experiments or non-model species. My NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship focuses on adapting single-nuclei RNAseq for experiments on Portulaca to examine the regulatory architecture of its complex photosynthetic machinary.
Spatial resolution and modeling of C4+CAM gene expression
Molecular methods are rapidly advancing to provide increasingly high spatial resolution of gene expression. This work provides the first validation of hypotheses concerning tissue-specific gene expression in Portulaca.
The genetics of convergent evolution
With many dozens of origins over short evolutionary timescales, CCMs are models for understanding convergent evolution across the tree of life.
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