Research

Our research is dedicated to discovering how plant systems function to solve the ongoing challenge of maintaining food, health, land and water for society and the planet’s natural and agro-ecosystems.

Plants offer enormous untapped potential to solve societal challenges, such as:

Capturing CO2 from the atmosphere, returning oxygen and water to the air, and releasing carbon to soils to build fertility.
Providing the sugars and proteins that are the foundation of human and animal food, health and building materials, in addition to producing millions of other specialised biochemicals.
Forming the foundation of urban, forest and agricultural landscapes that give beauty and mental benefits to humans and animals.

The world’s population is projected to reach 9 billion by the year 2050, yet the current practices related to the use of plants for food, medicine, energy and materials are unable to meet this critical demand. We seek to solve what are recognised to be the greatest challenges to face humanity in the next three decades.

Research highlights

Laboratories and research groups

Plant Systematics Research Group

The Plant Systematics Research Group studies the phylogeny, classification and biogeography of Australasian plants, including eucalypts, acacias, Eremophila, Nicotiana, Dianella, Grevillea, the family Rutaceae, ferns and bryophytes.
Ebert Lab

The Ebert lab aims to understand the mechanisms that drive the controlled assembly of sugars within the secretory pathway, combining cell biology, biochemistry, molecular genetics and evolution with advanced microscopy and mass spectrometry.
Adaptive Evolution Lab

The Adaptive Evolution Lab combines experimental and computational approaches to study the effect of environmental variation and stress on natural population, using a range of experimental models to test hypotheses related to climate change and pesticide exposure.
Golz Group: Plant Developmental Genetics

The Golz Group's main focus is to understand how complex patterns of gene expression are generated and maintained during cell-type specification and differentiation in multicellular organisms.
Haydon Lab: Plant Cell Signalling

The Haydon Lab uses genetics, chemical genetics, molecular biology and biochemistry to understand mechanisms that control circadian rhythms, with a particular focus on metabolic signalling and nutrient balance.
Heazlewood Lab: Plant Glycomics

The Heazlewood Lab studies the utilisation of subcellular proteomic data from compartments involved in plant cell wall biosynthesis to investigate protein function and metabolic partitioning.
Mycology Laboratory: Fungal biology research

The Mycology Laboratory studies how fungi respond to their environment to change physiology and development, working on multiple and diverse species to address long-standing questions in fungal and eukaryotic biology by comparative approaches.
Johnson Lab: Plant nutrition and biofortification of cereal crops

The Johnson Lab employs a variety of molecular tools to discover, characterise and engineer plant genes that are important for the absorption and bioavailability of iron and zinc.
Roessner Lab

The Roessner Lab applies a multidisciplinary approach combining analytical biochemistry, biology, microbiology and bioinformatics to unravel the biosynthetic pathways involved in plants, using state-of-the-art mass spectrometry technologies.
Watt Group

The Watt Group studies how root-microorganism dynamics can be optimised with genetics or management to save water, land and fertiliser in agricultural and natural systems, to answer one of the great challenges of the future: feeding the growing world population in a dynamically changing environment.
Verbruggen Lab: Algal evolution and coral holobiont biology

The Verbruggen Lab carries out an eclectic range of research on algal biology and coral holobiont functioning, including biodiversity, genome biology, photophysiology, molecular phylogenetics and evolutionary biology.