Research interests
There are many situations in a plant’s life when self-destruction of some cells is required. This may happen to create empty spaces inside tissues or when energy needs recycling for new growth or when a scorched earth policy is required to stop the progression of a pathogen. These situations occur during e.g. the germination of seeds, the differentiation of vascular elements, the reproduction and the senescence of plants and under pathogen attack. In all cases, a precise and spatially confined activation of cell death is required and can only been achieved by a complex genetic control. Genetically controlled self-destruction of a cell is termed Programmed Cell Death (PCD). The process of PCD in plants is unlikely to mirror what has been described in animal and is likely to represent a novel alternative pathway to be discovered. In particular, major animal regulators such as the Bcl2 family and the caspase family are absent from plants genomes. Unravelling the molecular mechanism of plant PCD has implications for the understanding of PCD evolution in eukaryotes and for biotech applications in plants and algae. The research in my laboratory is entirely focussed on discovering the network of the core components of PCD in plants.