The research at the department is focusing on physiological, biochemical and molecular aspects of plant adaptation to their environment in a broad sense.
We are for example studying tolerance to freezing temperatures at several organizational levels in the plant. Further we have groups concerned with basic cellular biological questions like degradational pathways, cellular trafficking and energy metabolism. An important direction of our research is in forest biotechnology, forest genetics and forest pathology. The main part of the research at the department is motivated from purely basic scientific questions although applied projects are given some priority.