Alice Cheung

My laboratory has a long-standing effort in understanding signaling transduction mechanisms in plants, in particular how they pertain to mediating male-female interactions that underlie successful plant sexual reproduction. During fertilization in flowering plants (angiosperms), the precise delivery of immotile sperm cells to the egg apparatus is a fascinating biological process requiring complex cell-to-cell communication events between the sperm cell carrier (pollen tube) and the female reproductive tissues. While these processes are highly specialized, distinct from most biological processes in plants and animal reproduction, many aspects of their signal transduction pathways are conserved in their overarching themes. Therefore, we also have a major interest in advancing the understanding of signaling mechanisms that govern plant growth, development and how they cope with the environment. These two areas of our research often synergistically enhance each other facilitating depth in our investigation. Growth, the ability to produce seeds and to cope with environmental adversity ultimately underlie plant productivity. Though with a focus on advancing mechanistic understanding of fundamental processes, our work is increasingly intertwined with investigations in areas directly impacting agricultural problems such as how plant cope with environmental stresses during growth and they discriminate between self and non-self during reproduction to ensure hybrid vigor or overcome reproductive barriers to generate diversity.