http://www.noble.org/PlantBio/Udvardi/lab.html

or: http://www.noble.org/PlantBio/Udvardi/index.html

Research:

Research in the group addresses several issues in plant science related to agriculture, including: how plants obtain macronutrients, especially nitrogen, from the soil or via symbiosis with bacteria; how perennial plants recycle and conserve nutrients during shoot senescence; how plants respond and acclimate to environmental stress such as drought and salinity; and how plants control storage metabolism during seed development. Much of the group's work involves the model legume, Medicago truncatula, and ties into research on forage legumes being performed in other Noble Foundation labs. Legumes are a primary source of food and feed for humans and livestock. Legumes are also a key component of sustainable agriculture because of their ability to 'fix' atmospheric molecular nitrogen, via symbiosis with bacteria called rhizobia, into ammonium, which is used for plant growth instead of industrial N-fertilizer.

We also work on switchgrass, a prairie grass with significant potential as a bioenergy crop. We are developing tools for functional genomics and using these to identify genes that control nutrient remobilization during senescence, with a view to minimizing losses of macronutrients from the soil with the harvested biomass. Natural variation amongst switchgrass ecotypes for nutrient use efficiency is also being assessed to the same end.