IGI Seminar Series: A CLASSY way to control the epigenome during plant development

Summary

Join us for this week's Seminar Series led by Julie Law, Associate Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. DNA methylation shapes the epigenetic landscape of the genome, plays critical roles in regulating gene expression, and ensures transposon silencing. As evidenced by the numerous defects associated with aberrant DNA methylation landscapes, establishing proper tissue-specific methylation patterns is critical. Yet, how such differences arise remains a largely open question in both plants and animals. Here the Law lab demonstrates that four locus-specific regulators of DNA methylation, CLASSY1-4 (CLSY1-4), which are differentially expressed during plant development, also play major roles in controlling tissue-specific DNA methylation patterns. Depending on the tissue, the genetic requirements for specific CLSYs differ significantly and, on a global scale, certain clsy mutants are sufficient to largely shift the epigenetic landscape between tissues. Together, these findings not only reveal substantial epigenetic diversity between tissues, but assign these changes to specific CLSY proteins, revealing how locus-specific targeting combined with tissue-specific expression enables the CLSYs to generate epigenetic diversity during plant development. Read more about the Law lab's research here.

Join us for the live event on Zoom. All participants and hosts are required to sign into a Zoom account prior to joining meetings.

Speaker

Julie Law — Julie Law is an Associate Professor in the Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and Biophysics from Oregon State University in 2001 and her Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2006 where she investigated RNA editing in Trypanosome brucei in the Sollner-Webb laboratory. Law’s post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Steven E. Jacobsen at the University of California, Los Angeles focused on understanding the roles of small RNAs in targeting DNA methylation and gene silencing in Arabidopsis thaliana and was supported by a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Health. In September of 2012, Law joined the Plant Biology program at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences as an Assistant Professor where she continues to focus on epigenetics and other chromatin based processes. In January of 2019, Law was promoted to an Associate Professor.