Jerry D. Cohen

Cell signaling and growth regulation: The primary signal transduction systems in plants involve hormonal messengers that translate developmental, positional and environmental information into optimized growth and development. It is one of the fundamental goals of this laboratory to understand in precise detail how the levels of auxin (indole-3-acetic acid, IAA), the first discovered plant hormone, are regulated in specific cells and tissues within plants.

Toward single cell biology: One of the major limiting factors in plant metabolomics is the absence of effective methods for measuring spatial distributions of metabolites. We are currently evaluating many microsampling techniques for targeted metabolomics and metabolic flux analysis, especially for indolic metabolites and stress-related compounds in plants.

Communication between plants and insects: The deposition of antimicrobial plant resins in honey bee nests has important physiological benefits, however resin foraging is difficult to approach experimentally because resin composition is highly variable among and between plant families, the environmental and plant-genotypic effects on resins are unknown, and resin foragers are relatively rare and often forage in unobservable tree canopies. We use metabolomic methods as a type of environmental forensics to track individual resin forager behavior through comparisons of global resin metabolite patterns

Metabolomics and metabolic flux analysis: The flow of matter through an organism’s network of metabolic pathways is the most direct molecular indicator of an organism’s phenotype. Together with Dr. Hegeman’s laboratory, our goals are to improve the applicability of dynamic metabolic flux analysis to intact plants by optimizing methods for measurement of dynamic metabolic fluxes in intact plant systems using timed, stable, isotope-labeled nutrient incorporation, LC and GC-MS analysis, and automated data extraction and calculation of dynamic fluxes.