Professor, Division of Plant Sciences
The Plant Cell
St. Louis, Missouri
Blake Meyers is a Member & Principal Investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, and he is a Professor in the Division of Plant Sciences at the University of Missouri - Columbia. He formerly held the Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg professorship in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences at the University of Delaware, where his research group was from 2002 to 2015. His research emphasizes novel approaches and applications of bioinformatics and next-generation sequencing to plant genomics, with an emphasis on understanding the biological functions and genomic impact of small RNAs, DNA methylation, and gene expression. These studies take place in maize, rice, Arabidopsis, soybean, Medicago, and other species. The Meyers lab has pioneered and co-developed a number of sequencing based applications, widely applied to study plant genomes and their RNA products, particularly small RNAs, and the lab continues to develop and apply novel informatics and experimental approaches for the analysis of RNAs and their functions, primarily in plants.
Phased, secondary, small interfering RNAs (phasiRNAs) are of particular interest to the Meyers lab. Originally designated as trans-acting small interfering RNAs or tasiRNAs, the wider group of phasiRNAs are triggered by microRNAs and produced as siRNAs. Like microRNAs, phasiRNA function in the suppression of target transcript levels. Data from a broad range of species have demonstrated that the count of phasiRNA generating-loci ranges from tens (Arabidopsis) to hundreds (Medicago, soybean, maize) to thousands (rice). In the dicots, phasiRNA sources and targets include several large or conserved families of genes, such as those encoding NB-LRR disease resistance proteins or transcription factors. In some plants, NB-LRRs have a particularly high level of redundancy in miRNA and phasiRNA-mediated regulation. In the grasses, phasiRNAs from non-coding RNAs are prevalent in anthers, during early development and meiosis.
Workshop: Considering impacts of artificial intelligence in scientific publication and beyond
Sunday, August 6, 2023
11:30 AM – 1:30 PM EDT