Project partners

Yves van de Peer, Ghent University, Flanders (BE)
Jan Ulrich Lohrmann, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Germany
Lucia Colombo, University of Milan, Italy
Giorgio Morelli, National Research Institute for Food and Nutrition, Italy
Robert Sablowski, John Innes Centre, UK
Brendan H. Davies, University of Leeds, UK

This project will use genomics technologies in a comparative context to harness the information present in the diversity of species to fill in the gaps in our understanding of model and crop plants. We will focus on a fundamental, economically important and experimentally tractable biological system, plant reproduction, and use genomic and post-genomic tools to model and manipulate the regulatory network at the centre of the reproductive process. Using a comparative approach, we aim to understand how evolutionary variation in non-coding DNA regions has led to variation in reproductive processes in (crop) species. To derive maximum benefit from a broad comparative analysis, we will focus on a key set of genetic interactions characterised in depth in the reference species, Arabidopsis. Our final aim of this project is to achieve an understanding of the cis-regulatory elements controlling reproduction in plants, to understand the evolutionary variation in this network and to benefit from this information to predictably manipulate the system.

Our objective is to unravel the conservation and diversity in developmental programs. Although the factors that are responsible to shape the plant and its organs are often conserved, the transcriptional regulation of genes is distinct and determine the outcome

An example of a developmental program that we study is the formation of the fruit. In dry fruits, such as the silique of Brassica species, the fruit dehisce to release the seeds. Whether such a process occurs in fleshy fruits such as tomato remains to be elucidated. The factors involved are present in both fruit types, but their expression patterns may differ.

http://www.ciscode.org/