Robert Griffith

Rubisco is an enzyme essential to photosynthesis as it fixes atmospheric carbon into organic compounds the plant can use to create sugars. A rate-limiting step of Rubisco expression in plants is translation of the catalytic large subunit, which is encoded by a gene in the chloroplast genome (rbcL). The mechanisms of chloroplast gene expression remain poorly understood at the molecular level.

Robert’s project seeks a mechanistic understanding of how translation of the Rubisco large subunit is initiated and how Rubisco expression is selectively activated or repressed in different cell types of C4 plants.