Colette L. Picard

Campus

St. George (downtown)

CSB Appointment

Full

Research Areas

Bioinformatics / Computational Biology, Developmental Biology, Genetics / Genomics, Molecular Biology, Plant Biology

Education

PhD Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019
B.S. Cornell University, 2012

Primary Undergraduate Department

Cell & Systems Biology

Graduate Programs

Cell & Systems Biology

Research Description

During the development of multicellular organisms, cells must adopt many distinct fates, despite all of them sharing the same genome. How these cell fate decisions are made is a basic question in developmental biology. My lab uses pollen development as a simple model system to study the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that regulate cell fate decisions. Each pollen grain is a distinct three-celled organism generated by two cell divisions, the first of which results in dramatically different fates: one daughter cell will become sperm, while the other much larger cell is an accessory cell that delivers the sperm to the egg. Failure to carry out this division or to generate either cell type results in nonfunctional pollen and sterility. This specific stage of plant development is also particularly sensitive to heat stress, which is a major reason why climate change is threatening the yields of staple crops like wheat and rice worldwide.
The long-term goal of my lab is to (1) identify molecular mechanisms that ensure proper fate outcomes in developing pollen and (2) to determine how these become misregulated under heat stress to cause sterility. Our approach combines single-cell sequencing technologies and other molecular biology approaches with statistical tool development and bioinformatics. Results from this work will both improve our understanding of a basic building block of multicellular development, and will identify strategies to improve the fidelity of pollen development during heat stress, which will help protect our food supply from climate change.