''Breaking the Silence: How to make small plant mouths that support our sustenance''

Prof Keiko Torii

The University of Texas at Austin

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

USA

Nagoya University

JAPAN

Tuesday, November 15, 2022
11:00

Stomata, cellular valves on the plant epidermis, serve as critical interface between plant and atmosphere. The presence of stomata are not only critical for plant growth, survival and water-use efficiency but impacts global carbon and water cycles. In addition, stomata are one of the key developmental innovations that enabled plants to conquer terrestrial environment. In the past two decades, molecular genetic studies in the model plant Arabidopsis unraveled the key regulators of stomata differentiation and the mechanism that ensures proper differentiation and patterning of stomata. This involves intricate regulatory circuits amongst cell-cell signaling components, master regulatory transcription factors, polarity components and cell cycle machineries. The master regulatory transcription factors consecutively functions to switch the proliferation to differentiation state of stomatal-lineage cells, and the interplay of transcription factors and epigenetic regulators plays a key role. As we look into the broader implication of what we learned about stomatal development in Arabidopsis to land plants evolution, we now know that many core stomatal genes are conserved in the basal land plants that generate stomata. On the other hand, studies in aquatic grass species suggest extensive gene loss of core stomatal regulators. Thus, whereas acquisition of core stomatal regulatory genes underpin the evolution of plants' life on land, the loss of such genes has implications in plants' life stye to return to under-water environment. These are extreme life-style choice of plants, but what about those plants that strive on fluctuating water environment? We are now looking into how environmental and hormonal signaling pathways are re-wired to regulate stomatal development and how such re-wiring underpins versatile adaptation of plants to environment.

Jozef Schell seminar room
Technologiepark 71 - 9052 

Genome editing, cutting-edge technology for a sustainable agriculture