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Dr. Jonathan Comstock 105 Boyce Thompson Institute email: jpc8@cornell.edu phone: 607.254.1214 |
Plants differ in their response to environmental conditions. Some species are adapted to tolerate drought or heat, while others are specialized to other environmental conditions. Understanding this specialization among species will provide important knowledge that, one day, could improve the productivity of crop plants. The Comstock lab aims to understand why some plants use water more efficiently than others by comparing cultivated tomato and rice varieties to their wild relatives. Dr. Comstock’s research interest is to discover whether the cultivated and wild varieties of a species differ in their water use efficiency and to identify the genes that direct that trait. Using genetic analyses, Comstock has found two or three regions on the chromosomes of both rice and tomato that are critical to water use efficiency. The next step, which will take several years to complete, is to identify the specific genes in those regions that control water use in the plants.
For more information about the Comstock lab, visit our project website. Click here to see our summer 2004 interns.