Light signalling and plant adaptation to the environment

As sessile photoautotrophic organisms, plants evolved sophisticated strategies to perceive light environmental signals and to transduce them into molecular signalling networks. Though light is essential for plant growth and development, often plants have to cope with damaging or excessive light conditions, which generate stress and limits growth. We aim to understand the molecular mechanisms that allow plants to integrate beneficial and damaging effects of light and respond to them with striking plasticity. We are especially interested in the events that lead to coordinated transcriptional changes during light adaptation as changes in chromatin states, transcription factor stability and protein homeostasis. To understand the molecular mechanisms that coordinate these processes we are using genetic, genomic, biochemical and proteomic tools.