Colleen Doherty

Bio

Research Interests

The Doherty Lab studies how plants perceive, integrate, and respond to environmental signals across time and space. We investigate how biological timing systems shape plant adaptation to environmental change, with a particular focus on nighttime warming, temperature stress, and changing seasonal conditions. We also examine how plants interact with chemical elements in their environment, including the uptake, transport, and accumulation of rare earth elements. By combining fundamental plant biology with imaging, sensing, and engineering approaches, we uncover mechanisms of plant resilience while developing new strategies for rare-earth recovery, environmental remediation, and sustainable technologies.

Area(s) of Expertise

Chronobiology; plant environmental responses; phytomining

Publications

• Detection and Quantification of Dysprosium in Plant Tissues , Plant Direct (2026)
• Practical RNA-Seq with Spike-Ins: A Bench-to-Bioinformatics Guide , Methods in molecular biology (2026)
• Assessing the effect of spaceflight stress on DNA sequence mutation using RNA-sequencing data , Gravitational and Space Research (2025)
• Expanding frontiers: harnessing plant biology for space exploration and planetary sustainability , New Phytologist (2025)
• Nondestructive Detection and Quantification of Dysprosium in Plant Tissues , bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (2025)
• Physiological and molecular responses to high-temperature stress at anthesis in Brazilian flooded rice , AoB Plants (2025)
• Plant’s developmental decision to either abort a flower or set seed , Trends in Plant Science (2025)
• Transcriptomic analysis reveals time-of-day-specific genes and gene regulatory networks in response to chilling stress in sorghum , Plant Physiology Reports (2025)
• A normalization method that controls for total RNA abundance affects the identification of differentially expressed genes, revealing bias toward morning‐expressed responses , The Plant Journal (2024)
• An Arabidopsis Cell Culture With Weak Circadian Rhythms Under Constant Light Compared With Constant Dark Can Be Rescued by ELF3 , Plant Direct (2024)