Dr. Montgomery investigates how plants respond to light at a molecular level.

Dr. Montgomery received her Ph.D. in plant biology from the University of California, Davis. She is a National Science Foundation CAREER awardee and in January, she was named as an MSU Foundation Professor, in recognition of her excellence in research and teaching. In addition to the permanent title, she will be receiving 5 years of supplemental research funding from the university.

Photosynthetic plants harness sunlight to make nutrients out of carbon dioxide and water, so it is essential for them to adapt to changing light conditions. Plants contain a pigmented protein called phytochrome, which absorbs light, and which changes shape when it does so. The change in conformation (shape) allows the phytochrome to send a signal to other proteins in the cell and cause changes in gene expression. Signals dependent on phytochrome pigments have been shown to be important for many stages of plant growth and development.

Dr. Montgomery is interested in the subtypes of phytochrome: how are different subtypes distributed across different tissues of the plant and why do they do slightly different things? She figured out that if she took BVR, a protein from rat kidneys, and transferred it into plants, she could block the plants from making phytochrome. On its own, this isn’t very interesting, since plants don’t have BVR. But by putting BVR into very specific parts of the plant, it gave her a tool for blocking phytochrome in small segments of the plant and figuring out what the pigments in that region did.