Dr Afroditi Tsampalla is a Principal Researcher at the Institute of Plant Breeding and Genetic Resources (ELGO-Dimitra), Greece. She holds a 5-years bachelor’s degree in agriculture from the School of Agriculture of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, as well as an MSc (2007) and a PhD (2013) in Plant Genetics and Breeding. Her PhD work, under the supervision of prof Athanasios Tsaftaris, mainly involved the study of the molecular effect of plant grafting and rootstock-scion interactions on key fruit quality characters of the scion and more specifically on fruit shape in pepper. Her first post-doctoral employment was at the Institute of Applied Biosciences (INAB) of CERTH (Thessaloniki, Greece). After one year of post-doctoral work in Greece, she was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship by the European Commission to move to University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK) and work in the field of small RNAs with prof Tamas Dalmay. Her fellowship was about identifying genes essential to microRNA degradation (turnover) through an innovative Arabidopsis mutant screening. Since December 2017, she is a researcher in Plant Breeding and Genomics.

• Plant Genomics and Transcriptomics
• Plant Environmental Adaptation and specifically how plants process information on conditions available to fine-tune their development, performance and quality
• Breeding For Sustainability
• Plant Epigenetics
• Vegetable Grafting and Molecular Interactions between scions and rootstocks
• Molecular Breeding
• Molecular Technologies for screening of Biodiversity

“SAFE”: Sustainable water reuse practices improving safety in agriculture, food and environment”, PRIMA Programme - Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean 2021 – Section 2 (Role: Scientific Responsible and WP Leader)

Tsaballa, A., Xanthopoulou, A., Sperdouli, I., Bantis, F., Boutsika, A., Chatzigeorgiou, I., Tsaliki, E., Koukounaras, A., Ntinas, G.K. & Ganopoulos, I. (2023). LED Omics in Rocket Salad (Diplotaxis tenuifolia): Comparative Analysis in Different Light-Emitting Diode (LED) Spectrum and Energy Consumption. Plants, 12(6), 1203.

Mourouzidou, S., Ntinas, G. K., Tsaballa, A., & Monokrousos, N. (2023). Introducing the power of plant growth promoting microorganisms in soilless systems: A promising alternative for sustainable agriculture. Sustainability, 15(7), 5959.

Tsaballa, A., Kelesidis, G., Krigas, N., Sarropoulou, V., Bagatzounis, P., & Grigoriadou, K. (2023). Taxonomic identification and molecular DNA barcoding of collected wild-growing orchids used traditionally for Salep production. Plants, 12(17), 3038.

Tsaballa, A., Sperdouli, I., Avramidou, E. V., Ganopoulos, I., Koukounaras, A., & Ntinas, G. K. (2022). Epigenetic and physiological responses to varying root-zone temperatures in greenhouse rocket. Genes, 13(2), 364.

Tsaballa, A., Xanthopoulou, A., Madesis, P., Tsaftaris, A., & Nianiou-Obeidat, I. (2021). Vegetable grafting from a molecular point of view: the involvement of epigenetics in rootstock-scion interactions. Frontiers in plant science, 11, 621999.