John Innes Centre

Prof Caroline Dean

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Curriculum Vitae

  • 1978 BA Hons Biology, University of York
  • 1982 DPhil University of York
  • 1983 Post-doc toral fellow Advanced Genetic Sciences CA
  • 1988 Project leader, John Innes Centre
  • 1999 Associate Research Director, John Innes Centre

Caroline Dean

Project Leader

Cell & Developmental Biology

Contact details

caroline.dean@jic.ac.uk

Research interests

The Dean lab is investigating the molecular control of flowering time, focusing specifically on the acceleration of flowering by prolonged cold, a process known as vernalization.

Using Arabidopsis thaliana as a model system we are analysing genes conferring a vernalization requirement and are identifying and characterising genes that mediate a vernalization response. A central regulator in flowering and vernalization is FLC, which represses the floral transition. We are focusing on pathways that promote and repress FLC expression. It turns out that FLC regulation provides an excellent system in which to define conserved chromatin regulatory pathways. We aim to understand the molecular basis of these different pathways, how their interaction antagonistically regulates a common target and how this interaction changes throughout the life-cycle and during the evolution of different flowering variants.

We plan to translate knowledge emerging from this system into manipulating vernalization in different plants, focusing on Brassica (collaboratively with Judith Irwin) and wheat and barley (collaboratively with David Laurie).

Current Vacancies

Post No.Job TitleClosing Date
1002169Project Leader in Plant or Microbial Science (x2) 20-Mar-2012

Recent Publications

Angel A., Song J., Dean C., Howard M. (2011)
A polycomb-based switch underlying quantitative epigenetic memory
Nature 476 (7358) 105-108
DOI:10.1038/nature10241
Box M. S., Coustham V., Dean C., Mylne J. (2011)
Protocol: A simple phenol-based method for 96-well extraction of high quality RNA from Arabidopsis
Plant Methods 7 Art. 7
DOI:10.1186/1746-4811-7-7
Box M. S., Coustham V., Dean C., Mylne J. S. (2011)
Protocol: A simple phenol-based method for 96-well extraction of high quality RNA from Arabidopsis
Plant Methods 7 (1) 7
DOI:10.1186/1746-4811-7-7
Sonmez C., Bäurle I., Magusin A., Dreos R., Laubinger S., Weigel D., Dean C. (2011)
RNA 3' processing functions of Arabidopsis FCA and FPA limit intergenic transcription.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108 (20) 8508-13
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1105334108
Atwell S., Huang Y. S., Vilhjálmsson B. J., Willems G., Horton M., Li Y., Meng D., Platt A., Tarone A. M., Hu T. T., Jiang R., Muliyati N. W., Zhang X., Amer M. A., Baxter I., Brachi B., Chory J., Dean C., Debieu M., de Meaux J., Ecker J. R., Faure N., Kniskern J. M., Jones J. D., Michael T., Nemri A., Roux F., Salt D. E., Tang C., Todesco M., Traw M. B., Weigel D., Marjoram P., Borevitz J. O., Bergelson J., Nordborg M. (2010)
Genome-wide association study of 107 phenotypes in Arabidopsis thaliana inbred lines.
Nature 465 (7298) 627-31
DOI:10.1038/nature08800
Crevillen P., Dean C. (2010)
Regulation of the floral repressor gene FLC: the complexity of transcription in a chromatin context.
Current Opinion in Plant Biology 14 (1) 1-7
DOI:10.1016/j.pbi.2010.08.015
De Lucia F., Dean C. (2010)
Long non-coding RNAs and chromatin regulation.
Current Opinion in Plant Biology 14 (2) 168-173
DOI:10.1016/j.pbi.2010.11.006
Gleick P. H., Amasino R. M., Berenbaum M. R., Cazenave A., Dean C. (2010)
Climate change and the integrity of science
Science 328 689-90
Liu F., Marquardt S., Lister C., Swiezewski S., Dean C. (2010)
Targeted 3' processing of antisense transcripts triggers Arabidopsis FLC chromatin silencing
Science 327 (5961) 94-97