IGI Seminar Series: The Impact of Genetic Conflicts on Plant Reproduction

Summary

Join us for this week's Seminar Series led by Mary Gehring, Associate Professor of Biology at the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Seeds are the unit by which information is passed from one generation to the next. In flowering plants, seeds are nourished by the maternal parent during their growth and development. Nutrient transfer from the mother to the embryo occurs via the endosperm, a biparental tissue that is analogous to a mammalian placenta. This relationship is theorized to create parental genetic conflicts in the endosperm between maternally and paternally-inherited genomes over the extent of maternal resource transfer. These genetic conflicts appear to be mediated epigenetically – we have recently demonstrated that RNA Pol IV mediates transcriptional dosage of maternal and paternal alleles on a genome-wide scale in endosperm. RNA Pol IV is a plant-specific RNA polymerase that transcribes short non-coding RNAs that are ultimately processed into 24 nt small RNAs that direct DNA methylation, in addition to other possible functions. I will discuss our recent discovery that RNA Pol IV induces antagonistic parent-of- origin effects on endosperm gene expression programs, and its implications. Read more about the Gehring 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

Mary Gehring — Mary Gehring is an Associate Professor of Biology at the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gehring began her scientific career at Williams College, earned her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, and continued her studies as a postdoctoral researcher with Steven Henikoff at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Gehring came to Whitehead Institute in 2010 and was named the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Professor by MIT in 2011. In 2020 she was named the Landon T. Clay Career Development Chair at Whitehead Institute. The Gehring lab studies plant epigenetics — the heritable information that influences cellular function but is not encoded in the DNA sequence itself.