Research Interests Plants respond to abiotic stress by making physiological and metabolic changes that help them survive further stress. Many of these changes are brought about by transcriptional reprogramming My research focusses on the molecular mechanisms that bring about freezing tolerance in plants and the regulation of genes that protect plants against low temperature and other forms of abiotic stress. We have been elucidating the roles of a number of genes in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana that determine the plant’s level of tolerance to freezing stress. One of these genes, sensitive-to-freezing6 (SFR6) encodes a component of the Mediator transcriptional coactivator complex, and is essential for the transcriptional response to low temperature that protects plants from freezing. My lab showed that specificity in plant Mediator function (the ability of the complex to “choose” which genes it switches on) is implemented through distinct individual subunit roles and we published work describing the molecular mechanism that allows this to happen (Hemsley et al, 2014). Recently we identified SFR8 as a gene that governs freezing tolerance by influencing cell wall structure (Panter et al., 2019) and ongoing research is elucidating a role for this gene in desiccation tolerance. Currently we are working with Dr Gabriele Sosso and Dr Tom Whale in Warwick University to elucidate the relationship between plant cell wall composition and ice formation in plant tissues