I am interested in how cells sense and respond to changes in their environment, the perception/ transduction/ response pathways within cells and how metabolic state affects signalling pathways and cellular responses. I am also interested in the application of fluorescence and confocal microscopy to the imaging of intracellular events in response to stimuli.
During my PhD (held jointly at University of Essex and Marine Biological Association, U.K.) I characterised a range of motile responses exhibited by benthic diatoms in response to light stimuli and identified an intracellular calcium transient involved in the signal transduction pathway of one of these responses.
I am currently working on signal transduction pathways in guard cells. Stimulus induced increases in the cytosolic concentration of free calcium ions (calcium signals) are involved in the regulation of a large number of responses in plants and the decoding of these signals is carried out by a number of different calcium binding proteins. Calcineurin B-like proteins (CBLs) represent a unique family of plant calcium sensors that relay signals by interacting with a family of serine-threonine protein kinases (CIPKs). In Arabidopsis, 10 CBL calcium sensors interact with 25 CIPKs to decode temporal and spatial changes in Ca2+, possibly by preferential complex formation of specific CBLs with discrete subsets of CIPKs. Current research is focused on identifying which CBLs respond to which extracellular signals and to working out the details of the CBL/CIPK interaction network. This work is being carried out in conjunction with the Kudla Laboratory (University of Münster) and the Schroeder Laboratory (University of California, San Diego).
McLachlan, D.H., Brownlee, C., Taylor, A.R., Geider, R.J. and Underwood, G.J.C., 2009. Light-induced motile responses of the estuarine benthic diatoms Navicula perminuta and Cylindrotheca closterium (Bacillariophyceae). J. Phycol. 45.