Summary
I enjoy research immensely along with the collaborative exchange and development of ideas with my colleagues. I am fascinated by how life works and the more complex interactions that occur in biology. I think that is why I have been so drawn in my early student years to whole plant physiology and later to systems biology.
My research has spanned more than 40 years and focused primarily on salinity stress during the first two decades of my career. I wanted to make more salt tolerant crop plants, crops that can even tolerate seawater irrigation. In the last two decades, I have changed my focus to abiotic stress tolerance (drought, salinity and cold) of grapes using a systems biology approach.
A plant is a complex organism made up of many organelles, cells, tissues and organs, all of which work in harmony with each other. There are more than 250,000 plant species displaying a wide diversity of traits. Complex traits are influenced by many small quantitative trait loci (QTLs) indicating complex interactions with a lot of factors. Plant phenotypes are dependent upon genotype x environment interactions. With so many genes, proteins, metabolites and environmental variables the possible interactions are nearly infinite. Systems biology approaches are necessary to study such complexity.
