Plant Physiology Webinar: Root Development
Celebrating the December 2024 Focus Issue on Root Development
Recorded Friday, December 6, 2024
About This Webinar
The December 2024 Focus Issue of Plant Physiology, edited by Sigal Savaldi-Goldstein, Christa Testerink, Ji-Young Lee and Ikram Blilou, spotlights research on root development. Roots provide anchorage to the growing plant while foraging for water and mineral nutrients. Due to these important roles, roots and their formation, development, growth, architecture and physiology have stimulated longstanding scientific interest and a wide range of research directions. This Focus Issue brings to the fore fundamental questions, advanced approaches, and evolving tools relating to the study of root developmental programs, mechanistic views of root physiology, and intersection with the environment (for example, with abiotic and biotic stress, or with the root microbiome) across scales, from subcellular to the whole organ.
This webinar features speakers Andrea Ramirez, Amar Pal Singh, and Idan Efroni, who share findings from their work appearing in this Focus Issue. The webinar is hosted by editors Ji-Young Lee and Ikram Blilou and is moderated by Plant Physiology Assistant Features Editor Héctor Hugo Torres-Martínez
SPEAKERS
Andrea Ramirez: Rooting for survival: How plants tackle a challenging environment through a diversity of root forms and functions
Andrea grew up in Southern California in the town of Inglewood, home to the famous Randy’s Donuts. She moved north to earn her undergraduate degree at UC Santa Cruz in Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology. Then moved further north to do her PhD at Stanford in Jose Dinneny’s lab. Andrea is now building a root anatomical atlas of diverse species in the Brassicaceae family to understand how innovation in tissue functions help plants survive under stressful conditions. See https://doi.org/10.1093/plphys/kiae586.
Amar Singh: Jasmonate signaling modulates root growth by suppressing iron accumulation during ammonium stress
Amar Singh is a scientist at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research New Delhi, India. He earned his PhD in Biochemistry from Lucknow University and the CSIR-National Botanical Research Institute, Lucknow India. As a postdoctoral research fellow under Sigal Savaldi-Goldstein at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) he studied root developmental plasticity in response to nutrient stress. In his current lab, Dr. Singh focuses on how plants adapt to different nitrogen forms (nitrate and ammonium) and low nitrogen conditions. By combining physiological, genetics, biochemical, and imaging tools, his team investigates root growth mechanisms and metabolic responses under varying nitrogen availability in plants. See https://doi.org/10.1093/plphys/kiae390.
Idan Efroni: Stay in your lane: Regulation of morphogen mobility in root development
Idan Efroni is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He completed his PhD with Yuval Eshed at the Weizmann Institute, focusing on factors regulating leaf growth. He conducted his postdoctoral research in Kenneth Birnbaum’s lab at New York University, where they applied single-cell technologies to study plant regeneration. In 2016, he established his lab at The Hebrew University, and in 2017, he was recognized as an International Research Scholar by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Idan’s research investigates the mechanisms guiding plant organ formation, repair, and the evolutionary adaptation of these traits. His lab also explores the ancient cis-regulatory code that drives phenotypic diversity in angiosperms, with a focus on its molecular evolution and developmental significance. See https://doi.org/10.1093/plphys/kiae532 and https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.10.570601v1.
HOSTS
Ji-Young Lee
Ji-Young Lee is a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Seoul National University. After earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Seoul National University, she completed her PhD in Plant Biology at the University of California, Davis, under the mentorship of John Bowman. She then pursued postdoctoral training with Philip Benfey at Duke University, eventually starting her own lab in the United States before relocating it to Korea. Her research focuses on the regulatory programs that control vascular patterning during root growth and how these programs are reprogrammed in response to changing environmental conditions.
Ikram Blilou
Ikram Blilou is a professor of plant sciences at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. She received her bachelor’s degree from Abdelmalek Essaâdi University, Morocco, and her PhD from the University of Granada, Spain where she investigated the defensive response of plants to arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis. She carried out postdoctoral work with Ben Scheres at Utrecht University in the Netherlands where she worked on cell patterning in roots. Her research focuses on how plant cells communicate to transfer positional information and to instruct specific functions during pattern formation.
MODERATOR
Héctor H. Torres-Martínez is an HHMI Postdoctoral Associate in Dr. José Dinneny’s lab at Stanford University. His research explores the developmental biology of crown roots in Setaria viridis, aiming to elucidate the fundamental mechanisms governing root system architecture. Dr. Torres-Martínez earned his Ph.D. under the guidance of Dr. Joseph Dubrovsky, where he specialized in lateral root primordium development.
