I earned my BSc degree in Life Sciences from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I continued for a PhD in Genetics under the supervision of Prof. Joseph Hirschberg and Prof. Dani Zamir. During my graduate studies I used the tomato plant, and its fruit, to study the biosynthesis of carotenoids; the pigments that are essential in our diet (vitamin A), and are essential for plants (photosynthesis), in addition to coloring our world in vivid colors.

My interest in plant biochemistry led me to the Rose lab, where I started as a postdoctoral researcher funded by BARD.  My first project involved studying the role of catecholamines in plants, using Arabidopsis thaliana as a model, and in another project I used proteomic methods to learn about aluminum tolerance in maize roots. However, my main research focus has been the characterization of a tomato cultivar named DFD (Delayed Fruit Deterioration). The fruit of DFD ripen normally but stay firm and intact for months, and I am applying genetic tools to understand the molecular basis of this phenomena. Previous work in the lab highlighted the importance of the fruit skin in determining the length of the fruit shelf life. This finding led us to focus on the plant cuticle, which had not previously been substantially studied in fruit. As tomato fruit provide an excellent model system to study plant cuticles, I use tomato mutants to find new genes involved in the biosynthesis of cutin, a polymer mostly of hydroxy fatty acids that represents the main cuticle constituent, and to study the contribution of the cutin matrix to the cuticle function.

 

email: ti37 [at] cornell.edu