Dr. Busta Luke Busta

Unlike animals, plants cannot use movement to overcome challenges they face. Rather, they use a vast array of unique biochemical pathways to solve their problems - i.e. they produce toxins, deterrants, UV active compounds, and biomaterials, many of which are important medicines and/or industrial products. Research in the Busta lab focuses on understanding these biochemical pathways at a chemical and genetic level. They are using MSI resources to help with common bioinformatic tasks such as transcriptome assembly, differential expression analysis, phylogenetic tree construction, and so on. This research will advance our understanding of plant chemicals - a key step in using plant chemistry to sustain and improve human life while protecting the environment.