Ronan is a lecturer in the section Sustainable world of the School of Biological and Chemical Sciencesat NUI Galway and has been working at the University of Galway since 2012.After obtaining his PhD in Rennes, France at the end of 2000, he spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Basic Biology (Okazaki-Japan), then moved to TU Munich before joining the Max Planck Institute of Plant Molecular Physiology (Potsdam-Germany) in 2004. Ronan is interested in elucidating how photosynthetic organisms respond and adapt to their environment, especially at the metabolic level, and how the costs of adapting to a changing environment might feed back on the growth and performance of the organism. In order to identify the specific and ubiquitous mechanisms potentially involved, a broad range of photosynthetic organisms are investigated, from Cyanobacteria, micro- and macro-algae up to higher plants of agricultural interest. This line of research has both fundamental and applied aspects as a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in the adaptation of photosynthetic organisms to their environment is expected to provide invaluable information and candidates for biotechnology and breeding related programs.

The Plant Systems Biology Lab aims at understanding how green organisms cope with the fluctuating environmental conditions they encounter in nature, i.e. understand what are the geneticphysiological bases of robustness in sessile green organisms. Plants are sessile organisms and have to survive in very unstable and largely unpredictable environmental conditions, even within a single photoperiod. These daily fluctuations lead to unpredictable amounts of C and N fixed within the light period, and as a result unpredictable amounts of resources available for surviving and eventually grow during the night. Understanding the regulations behind is expected to provide tools for breeding new crop varieties fit to the requirement of moving towards a more sustainable agriculture. As a first step towards understanding, we are focusing on the effects of daily fluctuations in temperature and light intensity, which are probably the most variable environmental parameters fluctuating daily. Some of the questions investigated: How plants regulate their growth in relation to the amount of photosynthetates available? Growth and C-N assimilation are spatially largely separated, especially in grasses. How is the necessary cross talk between these two tissues achieved? What is the role of the phloem? Which kind of molecules are involved? Plants need to keep a certain amount of photosynthates for maintenance and growth at night, otherwise they will go into starvation and impair their growthmetabolism (Smith and Stitt, 2007). But this amount should strictly fit the requirements, otherwise an excess storage will be at the cost of growth efficiency (Sulpice et al. 2009). How do plants manage to achieve that? Is the circadian clock involved? The network of genes (we expect many genes behind such complex regulation) involved is of obvious plant breeding interest. Manipulating such genes should theoretically allow the production of new plant varieties fitting closely the environmental conditions they will be grown in. In other words, we should be able to manipulate the robustness of the plants which is at the cost of growth efficiency. For example, decrease robustness for varieties grown in glasshouse or increase it for crops growing in regions experiencing harmful climatic conditions. #8232; #8232;Motivated researchers and students willing to help us resolve these questions are welcome to contact the lab. More info at our lab website:a target=_blank rel=nofollow href=https:sulpice-lab.com?utm_campaign=pp-onboarding-2016-3%2Fhttps:sulpice-lab.com?utm_campaign=pp-onboarding-2016-3%2F