Past PMB Seminars
For a schedule of all Plant & Microbial Biology events, seminars, and lectures visit our calendar.
Flexible plant development for a changing world
Plants may respond to environmental stimuli by modifying their development. As the major organs of photosynthesis, leaves must regulate their size, position, and gas-exchange capacity to adapt and compete. Stomata, microscopic valves on the surface of plants, are essential for the regulated exchange of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with water vapor from inside the plant. Asymmetric cell...
Adaptation strategies in a clonally evolving fungal pathogen
A hallmark of fungal pathogens is the ability to dynamically re-shape their growth and metabolism during the interaction with the host. The infection process is driven by rapid responses in cell signaling and gene expression as well as by long-term changes in genome structure. Understanding the molecular basis of this remarkable cellular and genetic plasticity is critical to control fungal...
Decolonizing Botany
What does it mean to practice biology as a feminist? Tracing the colonial roots of botany, I re-imagine a more inclusive and capacious field of botany untethered and decentered from its origins in histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism. Drawing on recent scholarship in the biological sciences, , indigenous, postcolonial and feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), I show how gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation shape the foundational language, terminology, and theories of modern botany, and how botany remains grounded in the violence of its colonial pasts. "Decolonizing Botany" is a project that reckons with these difficult origins and lays a roadmap to imagine a new feminist botany that harnesses the power of feminist thought to reimagine the practices of experimental biology.
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Bacteria to Beetles: Microbial Specialized Metabolism across Biological Scales
Microbes are incredible biochemists, capable of producing a vast array of specialized molecules whose activities have been honed over evolutionary time. These microbial natural products, also called ‘secondary’ or ‘specialized’ metabolites, revolutionized the treatment of bacterial, fungal, and helminthic infections, and have seen wide use as anti-cancer drugs and immunosuppressants. Despite our medical dependence on these molecules, our knowledge of the ecology of these specialized metabolites, i.e. how they function in natural settings, is extremely limited. The goals of my research program are to understand the drivers and roles of specialized metabolism across biological scales, and to use this knowledge to inform discovery of novel natural products. In this talk, I will discuss our efforts ranging from understanding specialized metabolism by specific cells within colonies of single microbes to specialized metabolism occurring in diverse microbial environments on a continental scale.
Hormone-induced cell fate reprogramming during plant regeneration
Shoot regeneration has been widely used for generation of genetically modified major crops such as rice, maize and wheat. Despite recent achievements in the development of genome editing tools based on the CRISPR-Cas9 technology, the future crop design is limited by current methods of improving shoot regenerative capacity. We are now using molecular genetic tools to understand how auxin and...
[POSTPONED] Metatranscriptomic analysis uncovers prevalent viral ORFs compatible with mitoribosomal translation in environmental samples
The genetic diversity of eukaryotic RNA viruses is poorly described, due to sparse sampling and biases towards pathogens that impact human health or commercial agriculture. Positive single-stranded RNA viruses exhibit a distinct ability to restructure the endomembranes of host cells to facilitate their propagation. Mitochondria in particular are attractive targets for viral replication, given...
David Nelson: Buchanan Lecture: How plants sense and respond to karrikins, a class of growth regulators in smoke
Almost two decades ago, karrikins were identified in smoke as germination stimulants of plants that emerge after fire. Karrikins have since been shown to affect many aspects of plant development, putatively because they mimic an unknown endogenous hormone. I will present our current understanding of how karrikins are perceived by plants and how karrikin signaling is attenuated through feedback control mechanisms.
Sentinels and foot soldiers in plant immunity
I will talk about ongoing projects in my lab for a better understanding of plant surveillance system and defense metabolites. In the first half I will discuss how a nucleotide-binding, leucine-rich repeat receptor (NLR) called ZAR1 senses bacterial virulence activity to activate immunity. In the second half I will discuss how plant defense metabolites protect plants by specifically targeting a...
Modeling microbial influences on animal growth and development
Microbes have been adjacent to and integral in animal evolution. Invertebrate models facilitate the collection of high-resolution data on the impact of gut microbiomes on host growth and development. We will present some of our work in live model development and deployment.
Mechanisms and evolution of adaptive mutation bias in plants
Mutations are the ultimate source of all genetic variation. In this seminar, we explore mechanisms underlying the evolution of adaptive mutation rate heterogeneity within plant genomes. We discuss what emerging discoveries mean for ideas of mutational randomness and the potential for mutation bias to shape the origins of plant diversity.