Devang Mehta, PhD – Department of Biosystems, KU Leuven — CSB Special Seminar

CSB Special Seminar

Thursday, July 15th @ 11:00 am

SPEAKER: Devang Mehta, PhD – Department of Biosystems, KU Leuven

TITLE: Towards a new logic for photoperiodism in plants

ABSTRACT:

Plants measure daylength (photoperiod) with remarkable precision, enabling them to coordinate vegetative growth and critical developmental transitions such as flowering with seasonal changes. While decades of work have revealed the photoperiodic flowering pathway in the model plant Arabidopsis in intricate detail, the precise molecular logic underpinning the first key step—daylength sensing itself—remains unresolved. Building on our recent discovery that plants can measure twilight duration through their circadian clock genes, we are developing an alternative to the prevailing “external coincidence model” of photoperiodism. This new framework challenges experimental paradigms that have long relied on artificially abrupt day-night transitions. Furthermore, although the plant circadian clock comprises a network of transcription factors that regulate nearly 30% of gene expression at the transcript level, we recently performed the most extensive proteomic characterisation of plant gene expression to date, revealing that circadian clock genes influence protein abundance to a much greater extent than transcript levels—an unexpected finding for a network of transcriptional regulators. In this talk, I will describe our latest work, which builds on these discoveries and new proteomics tools being developed in our lab, to establish a new protein-centric model of plant photoperiodism.

HOST: Heather McFarlane

LOCATION: Cell and Systems Biology, 25 Willcocks Street, ES3087

LIVESTREAM LINK: N/A