The Plant Physiology Research facility was started during 1980's by Prof. S.B. David. He established plant tissue culture laboratory and developed protocols for variety of crop and medicinal plants. He initiated the production of secondary metabolites in vitro, by manipulating the different growth conditions, for the first time in the department.
This work was further continued by his students Dr. G.S. Chinchanikar, Dr. S.S. Bhargava and Dr. N.P. Malpathak. The team further focused on tissue culture of medicinal plants in vitro production secondary metabolites, biotransformation and assessment of molecular diversity.

Prof. M.G. Shitole, and his team concentrated on screening for salt tolerance of several crop plants and discovered mechanism of salt tolerance in crop plant like Safflower, Linseed, Bajra, Oat, Grapes and blue green algae like Lingbya. The study was at morphological as well as cellular level, both in vitro and in vivo. He also developed salt tolerant calli in safflower, Niger and grapes. Recently, a low cost sugarcane micro propagation technique has also been developed.

Currently, Prof. M.G. Shitole and his research team is engaged in Micro propagation, Phytochemistry and Activity testing of Medicinal Plants, Isolation of bioactive compounds and their Structure elucidation. Studies in Genetic diversity in soybean and molecular markers for salt tolerance in collaboration with BARC (Bhabha Atomic Research Center, Mumbai). Engineering salt tolerance in rice, isolation and characterization of salt inducible proteins in rice and other crop plants. His group is also working on making a Hotspot inventory on fragile ecosystems in collaboration with ISRO.