Ivo Große and Marcel Quint, second project
Prof. Ivo Große
Institute for Informatics/Bioinformatics
Von-Seckendorff-Platz 1
06120 Halle (Saale)
phone: +49 (0) 345-
55 24774
ivo.grosse@informatik.uni-halle.de
Dr. Marcel Quint
Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry
Weinberg 3
06120 Halle (Saale)
phone: +49 (0) 345-5582 1230
Marcel.Quint@ipb-halle.de
Phylotranscriptomic analysis of post-embryonic plant development
The developmental hourglass represents one of the classic concepts in developmental biology. It describes the morphological progression of embryos from related animal species from conception to birth. While early-stage embryos appear different, they surprisingly converge on a similar form towards mid-embryogenesis, only to diverge again in late embryogenesis. Although convincing molecular support has recently been generated for this historically anatomic phenomenon, the function of the developmental hourglass and how it is regulated still remains an enigma. We could recently show that a molecular hourglass exists not only in the animal kingdom, but that a similar transcriptional pattern convergently evolved also in the plant kingdom. Together, this suggests the existence of a common, but independently evolved, logic that controls embryogenesis across kingdoms. However, in contrast to animals, plant development takes place not primarily during embryogenesis, but rather during post-embryonic life. Based on this observation, we hypothesize that not only embryogenesis but also post-embryonic developmental processes may be regulated in an evolutionary conserved manner. We plan to test this hypothesis for different developmental processes in the next few years, and within this proposal we plan to test it for flower initiation, one of the most essential post-embryonic developmental processes in angiosperms. We plan to test this hypothesis by generating high-resolution transcriptome times series of ten different stages during flower initiation in three related species from the Brassicaceae genus including the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana.