Cory Hirsch

Plant Stress Resistance Biology

Plants respond to stresses by triggering a collection of molecular and cellular processes. Plant stresses can be abiotic, such as extreme temperatures, salinity, and drought; or biotic, such as pathogens and herbivores. These stresses affect the plants ability for proper growth, total yield, quality, and survival.

My group is largely interested in using enabling technologies to understand genomic and expression variation within species and associating these with phenotypic information to understand abiotic and biotic stresses. This includes understanding how this variation is manifested and how this variation influences phenotypes. We are utilizing a myriad of approaches towards increasing and sustaining plant health, including understanding responses to extreme temperatures and salinity, the role of the microbiome in plant stress response, and plant pathogen interactions, by asking questions about global gene expression responses, the mechanisms of response, the genome architecture of plants and pathogens, metabolite profiles, and precise and reproducible large-scale phenotyping. While using cutting edge technologies can answer important biological questions, we also focus on determining the limitations of data analyses using these technologies to enable accurate biological interpretations, especially in complex plant genomes.