Elena Monte’s research focuses on the mechanisms that enable photosynthetic organisms to survive and thrive under changing light conditions. She leads the “Environmental Control of Plant and Algae Growth” group at the CRAG Institute in Barcelona, Spain. As a senior author, she has published extensively in journals such as Nature Communications, PNAS, Current Biology, and The Plant Cell. Her laboratory has made significant contributions to understanding how phytochrome-interacting transcription factors (PIFs) optimise plant fitness. Building on her seminal 2016 Nature Communications study, her work has increasingly centred on photoprotection and the crucial role of chloroplast-to-nucleus communication in maintaining plant performance.
Her research objective is to uncover the fundamental processes that link photoreception to photoprotection, with particular emphasis on chloroplast retrograde signalling and the maintenance of photosynthetic capacity. Supported by national and international funding sources—including the University of California, the NSF, EMBO, and FEBS—she has developed expertise in advanced biochemistry, cell biology, and omics approaches. During a visiting scholarship in Krishna Niyogi’s laboratory at UC Berkeley (2018), she gained complementary experience that now enables her team to integrate plant and Chlamydomonas research to accelerate insights into the core principles of photoprotection.
Amid the growing challenges posed by climate change, improving crop productivity and quality under abiotic stress is increasingly urgent, with enhanced tolerance to high light being a critical trait. By deepening our understanding of photoprotection mechanisms, her long-term goal is to help translate fundamental discoveries into future biotechnological and agricultural applications.
