Dr Jim Rowe

The escalating frequency of ‘flash droughts’, rapid farmland desiccation due to soaring temperatures and arid climates, threatens global food security. Understanding plant stress responses is critical if we are to generate new crops that can both withstand stress but also continue to thrive and deliver optimal yields. Plant responses to drought and low humidity are controlled by the plant hormone, abscisic acid (ABA), which accumulates under abiotic stresses. 
To understand how ABA regulates stress responses and achieve our vision of stress resilient crops, we must be able to determine in which cells ABA is made and how ABA levels change during stress. Despite nearly 60 years of research, these key questions remained difficult to answer, until recently. 
I developed genetically encoded tools allowing us to see and quantify ABA concentrations in living plants (Rowe et al 2023). This major innovation resulted in surprising and illuminating results. We found that different types of stress elicited different patterns of ABA accumulation. Now, we must find out the functional relevance of each of these context-dependent, spatially defined hormone accumulations. 
My research strives to uncover how plants establish these distinct ABA patterns, and then uncover how these patterned responses limit water loss and coordinate stress responses. This knowledge will pinpoint novel regulators of internal water flow, transferable to crops, so we can craft plants primed for flash droughts, helping them flourish under duress. 

Career
My interests in water relations began in Junli Liu and Keith Lindsey’s labs. My well-cited PhD work showed that drought induced ABA inhibits root auxin transport, restricting growth (Rowe et al 2016). Post-PhD, I joined Stuart Casson’s group to specialise in foliar water relations, stomata and leaf physiology. Here we elucidated a novel chloroplast retrograde signalling pathway linking photosynthetic light capture to developmental regulation of water loss (Zoulias et al 2021).
My postdoc with Alexander Jones emerged from a roadblock in the field of ABA: inadequate spatial tools to understand ABA accumulation. So, I led the ABA FRET biosensor reengineering project, developing ABACUS2, and wrote image analysis tools to allow fast, easy quantification. With ABACUS2, I revealed surprising ABA patterns, and that shoot-to-root ABA transport maintains root growth in low humidity (Rowe 2023). 

• 2024- present: Royal Society University Research Fellowship - University of Sheffield
• 2017-2024 : Postdoctoral researcher - Alexander Jones Lab, University of Cambridge
• 2016-2017 : Postdoctoral researcher - Stuart Casson lab, University of Sheffield
• 2011-2015 : PhD - Durham University