The John Innes Centre receives strategic funding from BBSRC
The John Innes Centre receives strategic funding from BBSRC
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Department of Cell and Developmental Biology
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IntroductionDevelopment continues throughout the life of the plant. While many linear pathways affecting development have been discovered and are illustrated by elegant genetic studies, the challenge of the future will be for us to understand how these developmental pathways are integrated, both with themselves as well as with environmental signals, to enable a mature plant to grow from a seed. To study this interaction of the plant genome with internal developmental networks and the environment, we use a combination of genetic, cell biological, molecular and evolutionary strategies. The insights we are gaining provide both an increasingly detailed knowledge of the proteins involved in diverse regulatory mechanisms and a conceptual framework in which this knowledge can be related and eventually integrated into a molecular description of plant cell function. We develop genomics, modelling and computational approaches to achieve this integration at a molecular level, while cell biological methods reveal the location and dynamics of proteins in cells with increasing specificity and accuracy. The knowledge we are creating is relevant to agriculture; genes that control plant stature, form, over-wintering responses and growth are potentially useful for improving crop performance. Guided by evolutionary principles, we use our knowledge of biological processes obtained in laboratory organisms such as Arabidopsis to understand processes in crop plants such as Brassicas and cereals.
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