Aileen Magilin

Aileen is a final year PhD student in the Wells and Morris group. She is curious about all processes of plant reproduction, and is studying how specific cultivars of mustard crop (Brassica rapa) are able to flower earlier than other Brassica crops.

Her project focuses on the the timing of the floral transition, which is the stage where flowering plants transition from vegetative growth (growing leaf tissue) to reproductive growth (growing floral buds). She likes to describe the floral transition as the plant’s “puberty” stage, as it undergoes developmental changes to grow flowers!

Her project hypothesis is that the balance of certain microRNAs in the mustard (very short RNA sequences around 21 nucleotides long) are critical for regulating the timing of flowering in mustard plants. She uses a combination of wet lab (DNA and RNA-sequencing) and bioinformatic analysis (small RNA identification, RNA-seq analysis, bulk segregant analysis, and more!!) to test this hypothesis, and has set up a workflow for miRNA analysis in Brassica rapa.