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Dr. Hirschi Lab

What do we do?

At the University of Texas at El Paso, the Hirschi Lab sees plant biology/nutrition a little differently. When most people think about health, they think about food groups and diet plans. We think about roots, membranes, minerals—and the remarkable biology that connects plants to people. Our work brings together plant science, agriculture, and human health to ask a simple but powerful question: How can we grow plants that are stronger for the field and better for you?

In our greenhouses and growth chambers, we study how plants survive tough environments—like flooding and low oxygen—without shutting down completely. When heavy rains submerge crops, plants face a double shock: first the stress of oxygen loss, and then the abrupt return to air. We explore how plants manage this on/off switch and how subtle genetic changes can help them stay metabolically “awake” under stress. The goal? Crops that endure environmental extremes while retaining their nutritional value.

But we don’t stop at stress tolerance. We also engineer plants to accumulate more beneficial minerals and vitamins—and fewer anti-nutrients—improving their bioavailability for human diets. And we explore bold ideas at the frontier of nutrition science, including whether plants may carry small pieces of genetic information that influence our microbiome or physiology. Could edible plants someday deliver health-promoting molecules more effectively—or even serve as natural delivery platforms for vaccines or therapeutics? We think it’s worth investigating.

From gene to greenhouse to nutrition, the Hirschi Lab integrates molecular biology, plant physiology, and translational nutrition research under one vision: healthier plants for a healthier world.

We study membrane transport and stress signaling in plants, using Arabidopsis (a small weed) as a tractable system to dissect how proteins encode both ion flux and regulatory function. Our work centers on the Ca²⁺/H⁺ exchanger CAX1 and related transport networks, asking how modular protein architecture stabilizes distinct functional states under abiotic stress. By combining genetics, molecular biology, structure–function analysis, and quantitative physiology, we aim to separate transport from signaling and define the mechanistic rules that govern cellular adaptation.

We work on plants because they are experimentally powerful—not because our thinking is limited to green biology. The lab is built around experimental design, reproducibility, and scientific writing. Students are trained to build and test hypotheses, use proper controls, analyze data, and defend conclusions. The goal is to produce scientists who can move across systems and disciplines with confidence.