Seminars

One of our greatest challenges in the next 50 years will be to realize a global society that is fully sustainable. Water is the most limiting resource for plant growth, and agriculture uses between 70-80% of the fresh water supply. Despite its critical importance, key questions remain regarding how plants sense, transport and efficiently use water (Robbins and Dinneny, 2015). My research aims to understand plant-environment interactions using a holistic approach that emphasizes the importance of developmental pathways and molecular genetic mechanisms in guiding acclimation and homeostatic processes (Dinneny, 2015a; Feng et al., 2016). This work has led to the exploration of water-stress responses in plants at unparalleled spatial and temporal resolution (Duan et al., 2013; Geng et al., 2013; Dinneny et al., 2008), the discovery of novel adaptive mechanisms used by roots to capture water (Bao et al., 2014; Sebastian et al., 2016), and the invention of imaging methods that enable multidimensional studies of plant acclimation (Rellán-Álvarez et al., 2015; Sebastian et al., 2016). Today’s research goals focus on understanding the signaling mechanisms plants use to sense water availability (Robbins and Dinneny, 2015, 2017) and how such responses vary through natural genetic variation (Feng et al., 2016).