Ángel Ferrero-Serrano, Ph. D.

The environmental conditions a species experiences impact which traits are advantageous and will be passed on to the next generation through natural selection. As a result, individuals of the same species exhibit heritable genetic variation that manifests in phenotypic variation.

Plant systems, both natural and cultivated, face a wide range of environments. My research at the Assmann lab lies at the interface of ecophysiology, population ecology, and population genetics to study natural variation. I use Arabidopsis accessions collected initially from their natural range as a model system to examine the interaction between genetic, phenotypic, and environmental heterogeneity.

Knowledge gained from plants adapted to their natural habitat can improve our understanding of the selective forces imposed by climate and the underlying genetic traits. This has important applications in plant breeding. Crop-species have not evolved under natural environments, and its genetic variation reflects human-made domestication to maximize phenotypic traits of economic value. I am interested in rice as a model system for crop improvement. This is particularly relevant given the recent tools and advances in genetics in the last years have been enormous, and the rapidly accumulating genetic characterization of thousands of rice varieties.