Research area
Plant roots are highly plastic organs able to sense and adapt to the environment by integrating external biotic and abiotic stimuli. New technologies allow following and tracing root system apparatus and investigating gene regulating root developmental strategy. My research focus on the use of high throughput root phenotyping and metabolite profiling combined with Genome Wide Association, applied to multiple plant species, such as Lotus japonicus, Medicago truncatula and Arabidopsis thaliana. This has already shown to be a successful approach for identifying genes involved in plant responses to phosphate (Giovannetti et al., 2019). In the future, I will endeavor to characterise the most multidimensional phenotypes possible, including root system architecture, plant-microbe interactions and physiology, in order to gather more knowledge about the genotype-phenotype connection.
