Cotton
Extension Faculty
We provide plant disease diagnostic services to Extension personnel, growers, pest control advisors, homeowners, landscape professionals, arborists, and the general public throughout and beyond Arizona. I collaborate efforts with state and federal...
Crop Related, Non-Extension Research
Research focus: (i) Dynamics of distribution, prevalence, and co-diversification driving emergent hemipteran-transmitted plants pathogens in cultivated and natural scapes, including the phytobiome (ii) Functional genomic-identification of...
In the Melandri Lab we investigate physiological and biochemical mechanisms able to confer heat and drought stress tolerance to crops and we try to identify their genetic control.
I use a combination of high-throughput phenotyping, genomics, and data science to reveal the genetic architecture of stress adaptive traits that are critical for abiotic stress tolerance.
Our lab is focused on structural and evolutionary genomics of crop plants, and is leading an international effort to generate reference genome sequences for all 24 species of the genus Oryza, which contains the world most important food crop – rice.
My research aims to understand the intricate interplays between viruses and their plant hosts during infection, mechanisms of plant resistance to viral infections, RNA virus evolution, and viral population genomics.
