My research focuses on plants’ response to temperature. I am particularly interested in how plants react to cold temperatures, as a reduction in cold periods with global warming will have significant effects on plant development and their ability to recognise the seasons. Furthermore, unseasonable cold or warm periods, another consequence of climate change, can lead to increased stress when plants are not appropriately prepared for the weather, at the molecular or developmental level.

I am investigating the molecular changes that happen in plants in response to temperature and aim to predict these in future climates. My previous research has shown that temperature sensing is “distributed”, meaning that multiple molecules and processes are affected by temperature, and these are combined by the plant into the temperature input signal. To understand this complicated integration problem, mathematical modelling is a key method that we use.

A lot of the current knowledge of plants’ cold response is from work in constant cold temperatures. However, plants experience a wide variety of temperatures daily. Furthermore, random daily or seasonal fluctuations have a tremendous effect on the plant’s temperature sensing pathways. We are studying these pathways under natural and designed temperature profiles to unpick the effect of fluctuations.

Our research approach combines mathematical modelling and experimental biology. Based on the biological knowledge from experiments including molecular biology, genetics, omics, biochemistry and cell biology, we build a mathematical model to describe the system and gain insights into how it works and where we need to put more effort to understand it. The next step is to go back into the lab and do the experiments that will answer the questions revealed by the modelling.