NSF PRFB Postdoctoral Fellow Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts
Body of Abstract: If we are to tackle questions as significant as the evolutionary history of flowering plants, their mechanisms of adaptation to diverse and extreme environments, and their extraordinary success over the last 140 million years, more angiosperm model systems must be developed.
Here, in this collaborative project, we aim to advance a set of three divergent taxa, including Aquilegia coerulea (columbine, Ranunculaceae), Spirodela polyrhiza line 7498 (duckweed, Araceae), and Asparagus officinalis (asparagus, Asparagaceae), as preeminent models for studying the evolution of gene function in flowering plants. As a first step, we aim to develop tissue culture systems for the selected species and apply Bbm/Wus and GRF4-GIF1 to facilitate plant regeneration and gene editing in these species. We successfully developed a tissue culture and stable transformation pipeline for Aquilegia by inducing the expression of these developmental regulators during callus formation and shoot regeneration. In addition, we are generating high quality genomic resources (genome assembly/annotation, transcriptome data) for the selected taxa. When coupled with transformation and editing technologies, these resources would dramatically enhance the utility of species for a wide range of comparative and functional genomics approaches.