Die another day: extending the reproductive life and seed yield of monocarpic plants

Date

26 November 2018, Monday

Time and Venues

Venues	Local Time	Time Zone
Adelaide Waite Campus – B101-FG-R00-SmallWICWest	12:00 pm	ACDT
Armidale – B55-FG-R00-Small	12:30 pm	AEDT
Bribie Island – B01-FG-Small	11:30 pm	AEST
Brisbane St Lucia QBP – Room 5.140	11:30 pm	AEST
Canberra Black Mountain – Discovery Lecture Theatre	12:30 pm	AEDT
Canberra Crace – Bld44- Meeting Room 3	12:30 pm	AEDT
Irymple (See Natalie Strickland)	12:30 pm	AEDT
Narrabri Myall Vale – Conference Room	12:30 pm	AEDT
Perth Floreat B40-F1-R46-Rossiter Room	09:30 am	AWST
Sandy Bay (Hobart) – River View Room	12:30 pm	AEDT
Toowoomba – Meeting Room	11:30 pm	AEST
Townsville (see Liz Do)	11:30 pm	AEST
Werribee (Melbourne) – Peacock Room	12:30 pm	AEDT

Speaker

Synopsis

Monocarpic plants have a single reproductive cycle in their lives, where life span is determined by the coordinated arrest of all meristems, known as global proliferative arrest (GPA). GPA represents the end of the flowering phase, and, while GPA control is highly relevant since it ensures the optimal completion of the reproductive cycle and maximizes the chances of viable progeny, the molecular bases for GPA and the signalling mechanisms involved are poorly understood, in sharp contrast with the amazing knowledge that we have accumulated in the regulation of flowering initiation. Our group has recently uncovered a novel genetic pathway regulating GPA in Arabidopsis that responds to age dependent factors and is conserved in different species, the FRUITFULL-APETALA2 (FUL-AP2) pathway, which controls the temporal maintenance of inflorescence meristem activity. Interestingly, the FUL-AP2 pathway acts in parallel with systemic cues of unknown nature from developing seeds, but a possible crosstalk between them has not been studied yet. To address this question as well as to find out new players involved the GPA regulation, acting in parallel or downstream the module FUL-AP2, we are implementing different molecular and whole genome approaches that will be presented in this talk.

About the speaker

Cristina Ferrandiz leads the  Evolution and Development of Carpels and Fruits lab at the Instituto de Biología Molecular and Celular de Plantas (IBMCP) in Valencia, Spain, since 2002 (www.ibmcp.upv.es/FerrandizLab) . She obtained a PhD in Biology working in MADS box genes in pea under Jose Pio Beltrán’s supervision at IBMCP in 1996. Then she did 4 years postdoctoral work with Marty Yanofsky at UC SanDiego, where she worked on different aspects of reproductive developmental biology in Arabidopsis, and two additional years back in Spain at UPM in Madrid and UMH in Alicante before she got her current position.  One of the main lines of her research is to understand how fruit patterning is established, and what is the molecular basis of the morphological and functional diversity found in Nature, working in the characterization of the main regulatory networks that drive tissue formation and how they have evolved to adapt to different seed dispersal strategies. More recently, she has also become interested in the study of global proliferative arrest, a general phenomenon that controls life-span in monocarpic plants, and defined a genetic network that regulates the maintenance of stem cells in the meristems and thus the duration and amount of fruit production before plant senescence and death. This research has translated into biotechnological tools that greatly improve yield in different crop species such as Brassicaceae or legumes.    http://www.ibmcp.upv.es/en/personas/cferrandizibmcpupves