Research in my lab is focussed towards understanding how plants and algae respond to environmental stresses and how they utilise metals, both essential metal nutrients and toxic metals. This is important for developing strategies to ultimately improve food production in crop plants. We are also using this understanding to develop algae that can accumulate and tolerate toxic compounds such as heavy metals for removing toxic metals from contaminated water. A second aspect of our research is in understanding how algae can efficiently produce oils that can be used as a biofuel. This will allow us to develop the use of algae as potential alternative renewable and sustainable fuel source.