Plants across timescales

In-class or via Zoom  : https://inrae-fr.zoom.us/j/5785660130?omn=94998386329

Abstract :

My lab investigates how plants adapt their gene expression to respond to environmental changes that occur at different temporal timescales: minute-to-minute fluctuations, daily oscillations, and gradual seasonal changes.  My lab’s work has mapped the transcriptional changes (Redmond et al., 2025) and cell-type specific transcriptional activity (Vong et al., 2024) across divergent time scales.  In this talk, I wish to share how we propose to utilise this knowledge to develop strategies to screen seedlings for climate resilient properties, enabling faster breeding strategies.  We hypothesized that how the circadian clock responds to changes in day length (photoperiod) would correlate with the timing and synchronicity of development and qualities of mature plants.  Indeed, we found that the response of the circadian clock to changes in photoperiod in Arabidopsis seedlings is predictive of bolting time and bolting-associated traits (Locke et al., 2025). Using the first Recombinant Inbred Lines (RILs) between African and European Arabidopsis lineages, we find distinct Quantitative Trait Loci (QTLs) associated both with the synchronicity of circadian responses to photoperiodic changes and with bolting-related traits. Two QTLs containing K-Homology Domain RNA binding proteins (KH17 and KH29) are associated with splicing variants in the MADS AFFECTING FLOWERING2 and 3 (MAF2, MAF3) genes, including generating chimeric transcripts between these two adjacent flowering time genes. Many of the variants in KH17 in Arabidopsis ecotypes are found within its prion-like domain and are associated with de-coupling the mean and synchronicity of flowering time in Arabidopsis ecotypes. Therefore, we have identified mechanisms that impact Arabidopsis timekeeping both on daily and developmental scales.