Jazmine Humphrey
Tasmania
Jazmine Humphreys is a Research Fellow at the University of Tasmania and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture. Her research focuses on how RNA isoform diversity and chemical modifications to RNA contribute to plant adaptation, particularly in response to environmental stress. Working in model species, she studies how plants respond to water limitation through transcript switching, generating functionally distinct RNA isoforms from the same gene. This work has led to a broader interest in whether such transcript diversity shapes adaptation in natural populations. She investigates post-transcriptional mechanisms across a range of Australian native species that span diverse climatic zones. By combining phylo-transcriptomic and long-read RNA sequencing approaches, her work aims to link post-transcriptional diversity to adaptive phenotypes and identify new targets for crop improvement. This approach moves beyond traditional gene-focused strategies to harness natural isoform variation for building climate resilience in both agricultural and natural systems.