What we do
"Plant health is human health"
“We use 'omics' and other modern tools and technologies to address both fundamental and translational questions in plant science.”
Our group performs research related to plant biology and biotechnology. Our interests encompass a broad range of topics, ranging from the development of IoT-based and eco-friendly management practices for yield improvement and sustainable crop production, to the elucidation of mechanisms and genes that control adaptive traits enabling plants to thrive under adverse environments and their applications in synthetic biology and breeding of climate-ready crops, to the pursuit of detailed understanding of gene regulatory processes required for plant growth, development and stress response in space and time dimensions.We aims to produce knowledge along with the next generation of scientists who are adept to provide solutions to help sustain food production and security while also minimizing environmental impacts. These goals are set to resonate with both Thailand’s Bio-Circular-Green (BCG) Economic model and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that promote the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and the protection of natural resources and the ecosystem.
Food and agriculture play a vital role in Thailand's economy, with the agricultural sector alone accounts for more than 30% of the Thai labor force, providing a social backstop for its lower income population. While global food demand increases as the world population is rising, Thailand's agriculture has faced an aging workforce and extreme weather events, such as drought, flooding and high heat, continue to intensify as a result of climate change. Together, these impose a major threat to the country's agricultural productivity and its capacity to feed the world. To mitigate the climate impacts and sustain both domestic and global food security, agriculture of our generation requires both climate-smart management practices and new cultivars of crops that are resilient to more extreme yet unpredictable climate.
Our group reaps the strength of Thailand in its natural genetic resources and diversity to identify traits (and genes) that enable plants to survive an unfavorable environment and utilize them for the development of a new crop variety with sustained yield under environmental stress. We also take part in collaborative projects that aim to develop circular farming practices for regenerative plant production.
Flooding Biology of Rice
Rice is resilient to waterlogging as the species has adapted to semi-aquatic environments. However, most rice varieties are not well adapted to sudden and total inundation, and will die within a week if completely submerged. Nevertheless, wild and some cultivated rice varieties have evolved adaptive traits that allow them to withstand submergence. These include the ‘escape’ strategy found in deepwater and floating rice, and the ‘quiescence’ strategy of 'SUB1' rice that has been used for breeding of modern flood-tolerant rice varieties worldwide today.
In anticipation of more prolonged and severe floods, our collaborative project with researchers from the Prachin Buri Rice Research Center and the Rice Department of Thailand aims to explore both natural populations and mutagenized rice lines to identify and study genes that control developmental plasticity and resilience of rice under different kinds of flooding. This will provide us with new genetic markers and new toolkits for breeding of better flood-tolerant rice.
[March 18, 2022] Tiger with his screening experiment for submergence tolerant mutants. Looks like the apparent phenotype makes him happy now; his hard work is clearly paid off!
Post-Transcriptional Gene Regulation in Plants
Gene expression is a central process that controls cellular metabolisms, growth and development, and plant response to the external environment. Using the model plant Arabidopsis, our group studies molecular events that modulate gene expression at the post-transcriptional levels. We use genetics, genomics, and molecular and cell biology approaches to address how specific messenger RNAs (mRNAs) are selected for translation, decay or sequestration under different conditions and how their cytoplasmic fates are connected with other co- and post-transcriptional processes in the nucleus.
[Above] Cytoplasmic mRNAs are destined for translation, storage or degradation, the fates that involve several mRNA-ribonucleoprotein complexes including poly(ribo)some, stress granules (SGs), processing bodies (PBs), and those in between. These key regulatory processes requires different enzymes and RNA-binding proteins. Previous work from Thanin's PhD studies unveiled the Arabidopsis DHH1/DDX6-like proteins called RH6, RH8 and RH12 as SG and PB components that play an important role in the decay and translation of some stress and defense response mRNAs. We are now investigating how these and other decay factors contribute to cytoplasmic mRNA dynamics under different environmental conditions. Picture on the left is modified from Chantarachot & Bailey-Serres (2018).
Orchid Biology and Biotechnology
Orchids represent one of the most fascinating families of vascular plants that exhibit a great diversity in morphological and physiological innovations. They are the group of plants that lured Thanin into plant biology in the first place. Thanin has many topics of interest with biology and biotechnology of tropical orchids. These include but not limit to genetic diversity, tissue culture and micropropagation, genetic transformation and genome editing, microbiome engineering for plant production, secondary metabolites, and flowering time control.
WE THANK THE FOLLOWING ORGANIZATIONS FOR SUPPORTING OUR RESEARCH:
