Paul Quick PhD

Paul is the leader of the C4 research project based at IRRI. He is responsible for the day-to-day operation of C4-related research activities in the Institute and for managing and coordinating the global C4 rice program. He has over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals, has written five major book chapters, and has edited one book.

His research demonstrated the direct link between the light and dark reactions of photosynthesis, which led to non-intrusively investigate this process using modulated chlorophyll fluorescence. Paul discovered thiol-regulation of the photosynthetic ATPase and its mechanism of action, which resulted in the publication of five papers in the prestigious journal Biochimica et Biophysica Acta. His work on the coordination of photosynthesis with the metabolism of sucrose and starch, and the identification of the enzymes responsible for regulation photosynthetic carbohydrate partitioning has been central to the development and exploitation of this relatively new field of plant biotechnology.

Paul pioneered the use of transgenic plants for functional analysis of plant metabolism. This work is still regarded as the ‘benchmark’ for analysis of transgenic plants. Paul led one of the first groups to establish sugars as regulators of gene expression in plants, and produced the first papers that demonstrated the functional significance of sucrose transporter genes in plants.