A different expertise cluster in lab is represented by plant biologists that use a diverse set of tools to unravel novel mechanisms by which plants produce specialized metabolites and control their biosynthesis in time and space.
Through a combination of genetics, physiology, biochemistry and molecular biology we study different pathways of specialized metabolism, the interface between primary and specialized metabolism as well as the metabolic network as a whole.
Various modes of regulatory mechanisms controlling metabolic pathways involving transcriptional factors, microRNAs and riboswitches are studied in the lab. We investigate a diverse set of metabolic pathways most if not all of them both during development as well as under biotic and abiotic tress conditions.
Recently, research in the lab has ‘gone underground’ as we started to investigated the chemical interface between roots and organisms in the surrounding Rhizosphere space.