Professor Dame Caroline Dean

Group Leader Royal Society Professor Genes in the Environment, Our Strategic Research Programmes

The Dean lab focuses on how plants sense and remember winter.

The group started with three quite different questions:

Why do some plants overwinter before flowering?
How do plants remember cold exposure?
How do flowering mechanisms adapt to different winters?

Their genetic and molecular experiments addressing these questions converged onto how one gene is regulated. This has led them into a detailed dissection of chromatin and antisense RNA regulation of the floral repressor FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC).

The lab’s activities currently focus on:

Quantitative variation in FLC expression – This influences whether a plant overwinters before flowering and is through an antisense-linked chromatin mechanism
Epigenetic switching – Plants remember they have experienced winter in a process called vernalization. This is an epigenetic silencing of FLC expression through a cis-based, Polycomb switching mechanism
Natural variation – Arabidopsis thaliana adaptation to different latitudes has involved noncoding polymorphisms within FLC that confer natural variation in flowering and vernalization response

Below are three selected reviews – all the primary papers are available via the ‘Professor Dame Caroline Dean’s publications’ link below.