Benjamin Blackman
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Plant Science & Agriculture
How do plants cope with change, whether a drought that wipes out local populations or a lab dish where scientists try to grow a whole new plant from a few cells? Both projects ask how gene networks shape what a plant can do, and how that knowledge could help breed crops and protect wild plants under a changing climate.
- Fields
Plant Science & Agriculture
Ecology & Evolution
Genetics
- Topics
sunflower
Helianthus annuus
plant regeneration
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Characterize the cell types and gene expression patterns that arise as sunflower tissue attempts to regenerate, using tissue-level analyses and single-nucleus transcriptomics, which reads gene activity in individual cell nuclei.
- Compare how regeneration-recalcitrant sunflower and two readily regenerable Asteraceae relatives respond, in growth and gene expression, to treatment with shoot-promoting developmental regulators.
- Test whether changes in developmental gene networks during domestication drive cultivated sunflower's poor regeneration, by running experiments on both wild and domesticated sunflower accessions.
- Determine how genes and morphological, transcriptomic and ecophysiological traits of Mimulus guttatus evolved during the 2010s western US drought, using population genomics and resurrection experiments on stored seed.
- Test functionally how drought-associated alleles tune monkeyflower traits using gene editing, and evaluate their fitness effects under current and predicted future drought with manipulative field experiments.
More about the research
The first project asks why cultivated sunflower (Helianthus annuus), a major oil and snack-seed crop, is so hard to regenerate from tissue. Genome engineering depends on coaxing small clumps of edited cells into whole plants with shoots and roots, and sunflower resists this. The project will compare how sunflower tissues respond to various regeneration conditions with the responses of two easily regenerated relatives in the sunflower family (Asteraceae). Methods include tissue-level analyses and single-nucleus transcriptomics, which measures which genes are switched on inside individual cell nuclei. The work will track meristematic cells, the growing cells that build new shoots, with and without added regulators of shoot development. It will also compare wild and domesticated sunflowers to test whether changes to developmental gene networks during domestication caused the problem. The intended outcome is a toolkit of interventions that makes sunflower transformable.
Why it matters
Sunflower breeders currently lack modern biotechnology tools to confirm gene functions and speed up breeding; methods that overcome regeneration barriers could also help engineer other hard-to-transform species. The monkeyflower work aims to give land managers predictive frameworks for assisted gene flow, the deliberate movement of better-adapted plants between sites, which may help wild populations stay resilient as droughts grow more extreme.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
PlantTransform: Defining the Mechanisms Responsible for the Recalcitrance of Cultivated Sunflower to Transformation and Tissue Regeneration
NSF · Sep 2025 – Aug 2028
Collaborative Research: ORCC: Harnessing Adaptive Variation in Drought Resistance Strategies to Manage Populations Under Climate Change
NSF · Nov 2022 – Oct 2026
Closest labs
Steven Strauss
Oregon State University, OR·Plant Science & Agriculture
Screen about 100 sequenced wild Agrobacterium strains for their ability to transform poplar and induce transgenic shoots, and identify the strains with the highest rates.
Yiping Qi
University of Maryland, MD·Plant Science & Agriculture
Establish a shoot apical meristem-based transformation method that works across multiple wild and domesticated einkorn wheat accessions, measuring delivery and germline transmission with GFP and RUBY reporters.
Rebecca Creamer
New Mexico State University, NM·Plant Science & Agriculture
Survey seed collections, including China's Germplasm Bank of Wild Species, for seed-borne fungal endophytes across flowering plants to map where these symbioses occur.
The school
University of California-Berkeley: 46 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 825 research doctorates a year.
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