Great opportunity for early career resaerchers in Bristol

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/vc-fellowships/about/

Summer studentship opportunity

The British Society for Developmental Biology has advertised funded 8-week summer studentships in this link.

I would welcome applications from undergraduate students interested in starting work to identify mechanisms for branching in the lycophyte, Selaginella kraussiana.

Polar auxin transport is a key determinant of branch initiation and branch outgrowth in flowering plants such as Arabidopsis. Axial polar auxin transport is conserved between moss and vascular plant sporophytes, and transport via PIN proteins may have been involved in the innovation of sporophytic branching. However, links between polar auxin transport and branching remain to de demonstrated in seedless vascular plants. This project will use a combination of surgical and molecular approaches to identify such links.

If you are interested in coming to do the project in my lab, please get in touch by the end of february with a CV including the names of two referees, and an explaination of the reasons why you would like to come.

My e-mail address is jill.harrison@bristol.ac.uk.

Congratulations to Zoe Nemec Venza

Zoe has been awarded funding to attend the Interdisciplinary Spring School on Plant and Animal Morphogenesis that will be held in Montpellier from 25th February to 4th March.

The workshop will focus mainly on how genetics and evolution determine morphogenesis in plant and animal development, but there will be also an introduction on how to apply computational modelling to developmental studies.
It will benefit her PhD studies on the role of CLAVATA genes on morphogenesis in the moss, Physcomitrella patens.

Dispatch on Jeremy's paper

Thanks to Lilan Hong and Adrienne Roeder for their nice dispatch on our recent paper on Marchantia shape determination.

Evo-devo themed Phil Trans issue out

Cheryll Tickle and Araxi Urrutia have put together a themed Phil Trans B issue on evo-devo research. There is a broad selection of papers, mainly on animal evolution and development, but there are also two on plant evo-devo.

My review covers genetic and developmental changes in the radiation of plant body plans, and will be useful to undergraduate and palaeo MSc students at Bristol taking the ‘flowering plants’ module. The Soltis lab reviews the evolution of floral diversity.

Cheryll and Araxi have written an interesting overview of the issue including perspectives on the history and goals of evo-devo research and the current state of play.

You can access the papers here.

Paper on liverwort shape out

Thanks to Anne Knowlton and Current Biology for working with us get the first paper from Jeremy Solly’s PhD out, now online here :-).

In it we address the question of how plant shape arises in an ancient planar growth form, the liverwort thallus. We have found that growth rate variation is sufficient to determine thallus shape, and that auxin production in the notch region is likely to pattern growth rate variation.

In contrast, planar shapes in flowering plants emerge by differential growth oriented with respect to each cell’s internal compass, or polarity. The results raise questions about the roles of polarity in liverwort thalli and how the mechanisms that determine plant shape have changed through evolution.

Comparing liverwort and flowering plant development spans the broadest evolutionary distance in land plants, so if we identify shared mechanisms for shape in the future, they are likely to have broad relevance to future efforts to engineer shape.

Review on the evolution of branching forms out, and the evolution of stomata.

I have had a small review on the evolution of branching forms published in New Phytologist. You can read the article here.

I greatly enjoyed examining Bobby Caine's PhD thesis in Sheffield on Friday. He has two lovely papers out on the evolution of genetic networks for stomatal development, one on the bHLH transcription factors that are necessary for stomata development in Physcomitrella, and one on the mechanisms that pattern Physcomitrella stomata. There should be more on the way too!