Abiotic stresses, like water deficit and high temperatures, are important factors limiting crop and ecosystem productivity world-wide. Understanding the regulatory mechanisms that control response to these stresses offers the opportunity to identify potential targets for improving stress tolerance. The long-term goal of our research is to understand the regulatory networks that govern the response of cereal crops and forest trees to environmental change. Gene regulatory networks coordinate the timing and rate of gene expression genome-wide in response to environmental and developmental cues. We use high-throughput molecular biology and network inference techniques, including RNA-seq, ATAC-seq, transcription factor binding assays, and genetic manipulations, to investigate multi-scale mechanisms of gene regulation for bulk tissue and for individual cell types.
