Submitted by Ben Williams on
Plant biologists often need to transform, or engineer, plants, to introduce various desired traits of interest. However, in most plant species there is a major bottleneck making the process of transformation challenging: tissue regeneration. During tissue regeneration, some cells that were fully differentiated regain a stem-cell-like ability and are able to form new tissues. During plant transformation, a small amount of tissue from the original plant can regenerate to give rise to whole transformed plants that can then be studied. While this plant ability is exciting, the protocols for regeneration are often difficult and slow down a lot of experiments.
To address this problem, in our project we aim to identify new unknown mechanisms allowing some plants to regenerate better than others. A big-picture motivation for this is that some aspects of a mechanism we find could be engineered into slow-regenerating plants to make them regenerate better. We are working with the model species Arabidopsis thaliana, which is a great study system for several reasons: it has detailed genome annotations, it can easily regenerate tissues, and it has a lot of known natural diversity (over 1000 unique accessions). We will be performing a Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) on up to a few hundred accessions of Arabidopsis, to find unique alleles, epigenetic patterns, or other factors contributing to different regeneration capacities across these accessions.
As a SPUR-funded researcher, you will work directly with a grad student in the lab to perform regeneration assays on various Arabidopsis accessions to test their regeneration capacities. You will learn to make media for growing plants on sterile plates, sterilize and plate the seeds, cut leaf tissues, and observe and quantify the emergence of roots from these leaves (the regeneration process). You will be working in a sterile flow hood, monitoring plates in a growth chamber, scanning these plates, and going through the images. Although the whole experiment will not be finished in one semester, you will also get to practice using an online GWAS tool to input our phenotype values and check for any preliminary gene hits.
We don’t ask for any prior research experience, but we are looking for a student who is highly motivated and interested in the project. Additionally, while the project objectives are exciting, we will need to generate extensive data. We are looking for a student who will not mind doing similar repetitive actions, some of which require good hand dexterity, to be able to test a high number of accessions. We look for someone who is patient and has a good attention to detail.