email:
robert.sablowski@bbsrc.ac.uk
A visiting professor in the CPS.
Link
to Robert's lab web page at the John Innes Centre, Norwich,
UK
Research interests
Plants produce new organs such as leaves throughout
their lifetime. The cells required to build new organs
are recruited from pools of actively dividing cells
called the meristems. This continuous supply of new
cells is sustained by small groups of self-renewing
cells that reside at the core of the meristems and are
functionally similar to stem cells in animals.
My group has been interested in how regulatory genes
control the different cellular activities required for
meristem maintenance and organ initiation. One approach
to this problem is to reveal the changes in gene expression
that are set in motion by regulatory genes. This is
exemplified by our work on the gene expression program
controlled by the floral homeotic gene AGAMOUS in the
early stages of organ development (1)
.
The interest in early organogenesis has been complemented
by work on meristem maintenance. For example, we have
shown that the type of stem cells that are maintained
by the regulatory gene WUSCHEL in the centre of the
meristem have intrinsic shoot identity and give rise
to shoot tissues even when embedded in the root (2).
This led us towards more general questions related to
the function of stem cells in plants (3,
4). More recently, our experiments
on meristem development also gave us an unexpected insight
into the mechanism of gene silencing by small RNAs in
plants (5),
which we are also pursuing further.
1. Gomez-Mena, C., et al.
(2005). Development 132, 429-438
2. Gallois, J.-L., et al.
(2004). Genes Dev. 18, 375-380
3. Sablowski, R. (2004).
Trends Cell Biol. 14, 605-611
4. Sablowski, R. (2004).
Curr. Biol. 14, R1054-R1055
5. Gazzani, S., et al. (2004).
Science 306, 1046-1048
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