Kranthi Varala – Assistant Professor
Horticulture and Landscape Architecture
Thursday September 12th, at 3:30pm,
HORT 117 or via Zoom.
“Gene regulatory networks: Role they play in plant development and responses to the environment”
Plants exhibit great plasticity in their shape, size and growth patterns to best adapt to their environment. This degree of flexibility requires both a vast arsenal of metabolic products and mechanisms to tightly control the timing and localization of these products. Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are interlocking circuits of genes and the transcription factors that regulate their expression levels. We explore the structure of these GRNs in two contexts: i. plant development, using the seed lipid content in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana as a case study AND ii. plant adaptation using the response of tomato seedlings to chilling stress. In both these cases our work revealed a complex interaction of tens to hundreds of transcription factors that shape the plant’s plasticity based on both the environment and its internal state.