Archives Events
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
Shinichiro Sawa, PhD - International Research Center for Agricultural & Environmental Biology (IRCAEB), Kumamoto University -- CSB Special Seminar
CSB Special Seminar
Thursday, July 16th @ 3:10 pm
SPEAKER: Shinichiro Sawa, PhD - International Research Center for Agricultural & Environmental Biology (IRCAEB), Kumamoto University
TITLE: CLE Peptide Signaling Coordinates Long/Short-Distance Communication in Plant Development and Environmental Responses
ABSTRACT: Small secreted CLE peptides mediate communication between plant tissues, but how they coordinate development and physiology across different spatial scales remains unclear. In this talk, I will present two CLE-mediated signaling pathways. First, root-derived CLE1–7 peptides are induced during root-knot nematode infection and promote gall formation through a CLV1-dependent systemic pathway, likely by enhancing sucrose allocation from shoots to infected roots. Second, stomatal-lineage-derived CLE9/10 peptides regulate CLV1 expression in underlying mesophyll cells and activate WRKY-dependent signaling required for substomatal cavity and mesophyll air space development. Disruption of this CLE9/10–CLV1–WRKY module impairs air space formation, CO₂-dependent stomatal conductance, and photosynthetic performance under stress. Together, these findings show that CLE peptides act as diverse positional signals connecting distant organs and adjacent cell layers to coordinate plant architecture and environmental responses.
HOST: Keiko Yoshioka
LOCATION: Cell and Systems Biology, 25 Willcocks Street, ES3087
LIVESTREAM LINK: N/A
Carl de Boer, PhD – School of Biomedical Engineering, University of British Columbia — CSB Special Seminar
CSB Special Seminar
Thursday, August 6th @ 3:00 pm
SPEAKER: Carl de Boer, PhD – School of Biomedical Engineering, University of British Columbia
TITLE: Solving the genome regulatory code with AI-first synthetic genomic data generation and machine learning
ABSTRACT: Despite decades of research, obtaining the quantitative understanding of our genome’s regulation that is required for personalized genomic medicine has remained elusive. AI combined with big omics datasets have emerged as critical tools that enable quantitative genome regulation models. Our laboratory at UBC develops a range of computational and experimental tools to understand how our genomes work, producing better data for training and testing models. We are advancing DNA synthesis technologies to increase DNA synthesis scale and length, and genome engineering approaches to mutate endogenous regulatory elements easily and at scale. Finally, I will discuss several computational tools we have built for improving our understandings of the areas models perform well and where they fail so that we know where they can be used effectively and how we can improve them.
HOST: Alan Moses
LOCATION: Cell and Systems Biology, 25 Harbord Street, RW432
LIVESTREAM LINK: https://csb.utoronto.ca/live-stream/