Biography

My research focuses on the tolerance responses of citrus to adverse environmental conditions, especially those involving several environmental cues acting simultaneously. The approach chosen is to investigate reconfigurations in the network of interconnections among genes encoding proteins with regulatory/signaling/metabolic roles and metabolites and identify important gene/protein hubs potentially responsible of changes in node connectivity. To associate specific network remodelation with tolerance responses, we use the wide range of existing commercial citrus genotypes most of them characterized at the physiological and agronomic levels. This constitutes an unbiased and non-targeted strategy to identify potential gene targets of biotechnological use in crop improvement, not focusing on effector (dehydrins, enzymes involved in compatible osmolyte biosynthesis, etc..) or regulatory (PP2Cs, ANACs, etc..) genes but those for which the network analysis has rendered a positive correlation with tolerance traits. Furthermore, to attain a more detailed evaluation of the molecular processes involved, the system developed for citrus is transported to the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana for which numerous experimental tools exist.