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Owen Rowland

Professor

Research

Plants are our greatest source of renewable resources, providing food, medicines, industrial products, and biofuels. Agriculture around the world will face many challenges over the coming decades, including those imposed by changes in global climate patterns. In this context, a detailed understanding of plant adaptations that protect them against environmental stresses, such as drought, salt stress and pathogen attack, is critical for generating crop varieties that are more stress resistant. The improvement of crop drought tolerance is particularly important considering changing climate conditions are currently limiting agricultural production in large areas of the world, including Canada. Enhancing the natural defences of crops towards microbial pathogens and insects is also an important strategy in our efforts to reduce crop losses to disease.

My NSERC-funded research program is primarily aimed at understanding the biosynthetic pathways, regulated production, and protective functions of plant surface lipids and fatty acid-derived volatile emissions. More specifically, my research group uses a combination of genetic and biochemical approaches to study plant surface lipid production (suberin and cuticle) and their functions, largely in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana but also in select crops (e.g. soybean). Our ultimate aim is to provide information and tools for the development of stress-tolerant crops.  Our group is also involved in other applied aspects of specialized metabolic pathways, such as those generating products used in industrial materials or medical applications. For example, we use enzyme and metabolic engineering to enhance product production in plants or genetically engineer microbes, such as yeast, to produce high-value natural products.

Selected Publications

Kalinger R.S., and Rowland O. (2023). Determinants of substrate specificity in a catalytically diverse family of acyl-ACP thioesterases from plants. BMC Plant Biology,23: 1

Li H.-J., Bai W.-P., Liu L.-B., Liu H.-S., Wei L., Garant T.M., Kalinger R.S., Deng Y.-X., Wang G.-N., Bao A.-K., Ma Q., Rowland O., and Wang S.-M. (2023). Massive increases in C31 alkane on Zygophyllum xanthoxylum leaves contribute to its excellent abiotic stress tolerance. Annals of Botany,131: 723-736

de Silva N.D.G., Murmu J., Chabot D., Hubbard K., Ryser P., Molina I., and Rowland O. (2021). Root suberin plays important roles in reducing water loss and sodium uptake in Arabidopsis thaliana. Metabolites, 11: 735

de Silva N.D.G., Boutin C., Lukina A.O., Western T.L., Molina I., and Rowland O. (2021). Seed coat suberin forms a barrier against chromium (Cr3+) during early seed germination in Arabidopsis thaliana. Environmental and Experimental Botany, 191: 104632

Razeq F.M., Kosma D.K., França D., Rowland O., and Molina I. (2021). Extracellular lipids of Camelina sativa: Characterization of cutin and suberin reveals typical polyester monomers and novel functionalized dicarboxylic fatty acids. Phytochemistry, 184: 112665

Kalinger R.S., Pulsifer I.P., Hepworth S.R. and Rowland O. (2020). Fatty acyl synthetases and thioesterases in plant lipid metabolism: diverse functions and biotechnological applications. Lipids 55: 435-455

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