Welcome to the Goring lab!

Our overall research interests are to understand how plant cells communicate through signal transduction pathways to regulate plant growth and development. Our research is conducted primarily in Arabidopsis thaliana and closely-related Brassicaceae species. The main areas that we investigate are the signalling pathways and cellular responses that regulate compatible and self-incompatible pollen-pistil interactions. These are critical recognition systems for selecting compatible pollen to be supported by the pistil to enable successful fertilization. By studying the molecular and cellular mechanisms of these recognition systems, my research group has identified several new protein players including receptor kinases, downstream signalling proteins, and cellular response including secretion and autophagy. Typically, the genes encoding these players belong to multi-gene families, and so, we also use functional genomics approaches to characterize these gene families, identify novel plant signalling networks, and determine the biological processes that are regulated by these networks.