セミナー情報

Throughout plant development, cell differentiation reiterates through the same steps: cell pluripotency, division, elongation, and then specialization - my work aims to understand how.  I will be presenting two projects, which both aim to elucidate the genetic mechanisms involved in regulation of organ development in plants. 1. using the Solanum lycopersicum complex leaf as a system, we focused on the classically defined, yet rarely studied pluripotent marginal meristem (blastozone) region of a leaf. Using laser capture micro-dissection, we isolated six previously unattainable regions in early leaf development, extracted RNA, and made RNAseq libraries.  We combined differentiation gene expression, clustering, GO enrichment, and network analysis to find verifiable patterns of cellular differentiation in early leaf development. 2. the PIN-FORMED (PIN) family of auxin transport facilitators direct flow of auxin, which in turn triggers a cascade of molecular events that regulate most differentiation processes in plant development. Much of what we know about auxin transport comes from studies in Arabidopsis thaliana, especially atPIN1, yet we still know very little about PIN1 function outside of A. thaliana.  We fully characterized a previously undescribed S. lycoperiscum pin1 mutant, sopin1a.  The phenotype of sopin1a has a wide range of phenotypic abnormalities, including rare phyllotactic switch from spiral to distichous patterning, root lateral organ spacing and initiation, leaf and leaflet shape and fruit and seed development.  Using DR5::VENUS, we visualized auxin localization differences and found that SoPIN1a likely functions in retention of auxin in tissue specific cellular layers. This work will help give an evolutionary context to understanding PIN1 function in plant development and help uncover how PIN proteins may have guided evolutionary development in the plant kingdom.