Supervisors: Dr. Marco Landi and Prof. Elisa Pellegrini
Research field: Agricultural chemistry
Research interests: LED light, photomodulation, ozonated water, eustress
Department head office, via del Borghetto, 80, Pisa
giulia.lauria@phd.unipi.it
Giulia major research interests consist on the evaluation of innovative and sustainable techniques to modulate plant metabolism with a special focus on “plant photomodulation”. She approached to this subject with her MSc thesis in Agri-food Production and Management of Agroecosystems at the DAFE of University of Pisa (Italy; graduation in December 2020) in which she investigated the physiological responses of strawberry plants to narrowband LED light supplementation. From March to October 2021, she continued working on this topic with a research scholarship within a PRA project financed by the University of Pisa. Today “photomodulation” is one of the topics of her PhD project.
During these years, she has had the opportunity to get familiar with chlorophyll a fluorescence analysis which allows the evaluation of the efficiency of the photochemical and non-photochemical mechanisms devoted to energy dissipation by photosystem II.
Giulia Lauria PhD project focuses on in planta biochemical and physiological effects promoted by abiotic eustressors. The aim is to modulate the biosynthesis of targeted secondary metabolites with a twofold purpose: (i) to obtain vegetables with high nutritional/nutraceutical value, thus enhancing food quality and shelf-life, and (ii) to activate defense responses in plants in order to potentially reduce the use of agrochemicals. Primarily, she has worked with narrow-band LED light supplementation to point out the effects of selected light enrichment on photosynthetic performances and, in general, plant metabolism. Secondly, she is currently testing the application of ozonated water as a possible eustress factor in indoor cultivation by deepening the effect of ozonated water on plant redox state and physio-chemistry.
