August 15, 2026
As I wrap up the first year of my PhD (woohoo!), I keep returning to the age-old question of “What came first?”. Except instead of chickens and eggs, I’m interested in the chemical compounds inside trees. I am trying to understand and map the signaling cascade happening within tree tissues during dormancy release. Although there are not as many visual external cues during dormancy, changes are occurring internally within trees. We still largely do not understand the internal mechanisms involved with how trees sense their external environment and differentiate responses appropriately to survive as long-lived, sessile organisms. We suspect that a wide array of key plant compounds are involved, including hormones (yes, plants have those too!), metabolites, and nonstructural carbohydrates. However, much of our current understanding of how these compounds function and interact are based on studies from annual crop and grass species. Perennial deciduous hardwoods, like Northern red oak (Quercus rubra), operate on entirely different structural and temporal scales, so these same compounds likely function quite differently. Trees must balance these mechanisms across long-term growth and maintenance strategies, requiring fine-tuned cross-talk across source and sink tissues. To accurately predict how forests will respond to climate change and shifting seasonal extremes, we first need to understand how long-lived trees internally decode these environmental signals to survive.
Gearing up for year 2 of my PhD, I am expanding on a pilot study to try and capture the entire window of dormancy across tree tissues. My goal for this experiment is to understand how trees sense environmental cues and send this cascading response throughout the rest of the tree. Identifying the compounds involved is the first step toward understanding how trees detect and differentiate environmental stressors, and how climate change may impact these functions in the future. Here is a photo of me from this summer using our wonderful, new freeze dryer to prepare my tissues for hormone and metabolite analysis via LC-MS!