Plants are continuously exposed to various stresses. They are particularly susceptible to damage from weather-related events or insect herbivores as they cannot move away in the face of danger. Also, they require sunlight as an essential food source to grow and develop, and having too little or too much can be stressful for plants. Substantial economic losses occur every year because of these stresses to our crops, and the way we mitigate some of the problems in agriculture can have a negative impact on the environment.

Although they seem to be rather inanimate organisms, plants have developed sophisticated mechanisms to sense and react to their environment to become resistant to stress. We believe we can reduce the impact of agriculture on nature by applying the newly-gained knowledge in our lab about stress resistance to improve crop protection and growth.

Our research is funded by grants from the European Research Council and Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and focuses on these fundamental questions: