I am interested in how plants sense their environment and are able to respond to a variety of stressors, particularly through the use of their chloroplasts. When plants are exposed to large quantities of light, radical oxygen species are produced within their chloroplasts, leading to their degradation. I want to study suppressors of this degradation along with how chloroplasts are marked to be broken down. We use a mutant Arabidopsis thaliana line that produces large concentrations of singlet oxygen radicals when exposed to cycling light conditions. This artificial system allows us to directly study the chloroplast degradation pathway.