The Doherty Lab studies how plants use time (daily rhythms, environmental cycles, and temperature cues) to coordinate stress responses and optimize growth. Our research reveals how timing plays a critical role in resilience to temperature stress, including nighttime warming and changing seasonal patterns.
We pair these fundamental insights with applied projects that harness the biochemical power of plants for rare-earth recovery, produced water purification, and engineered sensing.
Our Mission
Our laboratory explores the extraordinary biochemical and temporal capabilities of plants to address challenges in environmental resilience, resource security, and sustainable technology. Plants are not only masters of metabolic diversity but also exquisitely timed organisms whose internal clocks coordinate energy, stress responses, and growth with remarkable precision.
We study how this temporal dimension shapes plant responses to temperature stress, including extreme heat and nighttime warming, and how disruptions to circadian regulation impact development, physiology, and resilience. At the same time, we harness the biochemical power of plants to build practical solutions for rare-earth recovery, water purification, and environmental sensing.
What We Study
Circadian & Temperature Biology
We investigate how the plant circadian clock interacts with daily temperature cycles, nighttime warming, and heat extremes to shape gene expression, development, and stress tolerance. By understanding how timing controls resilience, we aim to develop crops better suited for rapidly changing environments on Earth and in space.
Plant-Based Resource Recovery
Plants possess powerful redox chemistry and highly diverse metabolic networks. We leverage these capabilities to recover rare-earth elements (REEs) from waste streams and to study how hyperaccumulator species utilize REEs. Our goal is to turn plants into scalable, self-sustaining platforms that support critical materials independence.
Environmental Remediation & Water
We design plant–microbe systems for treating produced (“fracking”) water and remediating contaminated environments. By understanding how plants respond to complex chemical and physical stresses, we build modules for at-source purification and long-term ecosystem recovery.
Plant Sensing & Synthetic Biology
We engineer plants as persistent, low-power detectors and biosensors that report on environmental conditions and stress. Using genomics and synthetic biology, we develop tools to program when and how plants respond, creating living sensors that can operate where traditional devices are hard to deploy.
Our Approach
We integrate molecular genetics, circadian biology, stress physiology, genomics, and synthetic biology to understand and engineer plant responses. Our work spans controlled-environment experiments, field trials, transcriptomics and metabolomics, imaging, and computational modeling.
Join Us & Collaborate Join Us!
We are a collaborative, interdisciplinary group that works at the interface of plant biology, sensing, and translational science. We welcome inquiries from prospective students, postdocs, collaborators, and partners interested in topics such as critical materials recovery, climate resilience, water quality, or biological sensing.
Header image copyright: IRRI
