Mutwil Lab

Plants evolved organs, specialized metabolites, and a myriad of physiological and molecular adaptive strategies to thrive in adverse environments. A better understanding of the genes and pathways behind these adaptive strategies would provide unprecedented knowledge of how plants evolve and how to engineer more stress-resilient crops with higher nutritional values. However, the function of most genes in the plant kingdom is unknown, constrained to only a handful of model organisms, or inferred by genomic approaches, which often cannot reveal which genes work together in a biological pathway. My long-term goal is to uncover the function and evolution of genes, stress resilience mechanisms, and specialized metabolic biosynthetic pathways of algae and land plants by a combination of large-scale, comparative experimental, and computational approaches.