My interests lie in the use of bioinformatics tools (some of which my lab has developed and which are available at the Bio-Array Resource, bar.utoronto.ca) to identify novel aspects of plant biology, especially in the area of plant stress biology. For instance, cluster analysis of gene expression data from plants subjected to different abiotic and biotic stresses has provided putative functional roles for several plant transcription factors, cytochrome P450s, and other members within multigene families. Furthermore, gene expression analyses can also provide inferential mechanistic insights into the development of various organs or tissues, e.g. rice seed, at the metabolic or signal transduction level. Being a founding member of the Centre for the Analysis of Genome Evolution and Function, CAGEF - with its numerous high-throughput technology platforms, my lab is well positioned to utilize and generate large amounts of sequence and gene expression data, following a systems biology approach.