Antony Dodd is a plant scientist whose lab investigates the molecular biology of how circadian regulation affects the function and behaviour of different organisms. His core research interest lies in addressing how plants have evolved in accordance with the 24-hour cycle of day and night, and the implications this has for all life forms and the Earth’s environment.

Antony arrived at Bristol University in 2012, bringing with him a team of researchers who hope to answer these questions by working with colleagues in the University’s new Life Sciences labs.

When I was about five or six, my dad gave me a green book called ‘Understanding Science’. I think it was a series of small magazines that had lots of drawings of atoms that were depicted with coloured balls and cut-away diagrams of plan.

I think it’s intrinsically fascinating that a biological system can produce an estimate of time and of day. The fact that organisms can tell the time is extremely interesting. Everybody knows that people get jet lag but most people don’t know that every organism living on the planet has its own inbuilt clock and suffers its own form of jet lag and has its own ability to tell the time.

For me the big question – and I don’t think we’re anywhere near being able to answer it yet – is how did circadian rhythms evolve in the first place? At what time in evolution did the genes that form the clock emerge, where did these genes come from, were they recruited from mechanisms within the organism?

Circadian rhythms have been well characterised in plants, flies, mice, humans and algae but many evolved independently, with different genes and different proteins, yet they all seem to have evolved to form the same kind of interconnected networks that produce these estimates of time.

So it’s been like a convergent evolution, which suggests there’s a very strong selection pressure in life that has a massive impact on productivity, hence its importance.

These problems are important for agriculture but for me, the question of how a cell can have a clock and the biological form of that clock is really fascinating from a fundamental science point of view.

In plants, circadian rhythms are really important because plants depend on light to grow, so it’s an advantage for plants to be able to predict when the sun is going to go up and when it’s going to go down, because they can’t behave to move away from the source of light or towards it like an animal can.

So there’s a lot of molecular biology that looks at the anticipation of dawn and the anticipation of dusk. It’s actually really important for plant performance – if you interfere at the molecular level in the functioning of the clockwork that produces an estimate of time inside the cell, plants grow less, they perform less photosynthesis, more of them die, and they lose more water, all of which has major implications for the ecosystem.

I'm interested in understanding what the impact of circadian rhythms is on the functioning of the planet, which is something I don’t think anybody has thought about. There are all these organisms living on Earth that have these circadian rhythms but the question is, does it contribute substantially to the amount of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere, could circadian rhythms affect the formation of clouds, for instance?

And with all the interest in space travel there are key questions about whether we could cultivate plants on other planets, given that other planets will rotate at a different speed from Earth? And what would be the impact of that on the life we take to that planet?

Something that people don’t often appreciate about science is how emotionally engaged a lot of people are with their research. You go through this process of continually submitting papers and grant applications that are often rejected, attending conferences and giving presentations where your peers will challenge you, and then sending a paper to Science or Nature that gets accepted which makes you go out and buy loads of champagne – it’s an emotional rollercoaster! I guess it’s because people are so competitive.

I find biology is very collegiate, partly because of the variations in the funding opportunities and the related fact that many research groups looking at any one thing are quite small so there is a greater need to collaborate.

One of the interesting things about Bristol is that there are a lot of geologists and geographers who are experts at using mathematical modelling to understand the context of what’s happening in one plant or one animal on a more global scale. The opportunity to work with them is something I would like to explore in the future.

I think there are undoubtedly genes that have a massive impact on our planet and its environment that we don’t yet know about. It would be really cool if we could say there was one particular gene in all plants that had the capacity to affect what’s occurring on the whole planet, and to define what that impact is.”