Venugopala Gonehal
University of California-Riverside, CA·Plant Science & Agriculture
Every stem, leaf and flower above ground comes from a small cluster of stem cells at the tip of a plant's shoot, called the shoot apical meristem (SAM). These stem cells keep dividing for the plant's whole life.
- Fields
Plant Science & Agriculture
Biology
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
shoot apical meristem
plant stem cells
cytokinin
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Measure how WUSCHEL, a stem-cell-maintaining transcription factor, is made, split between nucleus and cytoplasm, spread to neighboring cells and degraded under layer-specific signals such as CLAVATA3 and cytokinin, at single-cell and tissue levels.
- Determine how WUSCHEL concentration switches CLAVATA3 gene activity on or off in the shoot apical meristem, using experimental perturbations combined with computational modeling.
- Integrate a continuous signaling model of WUSCHEL accumulation with a stochastic model of CLAVATA3 transcription to build a hybrid model explaining how the WUSCHEL gradient stays robust.
More about the research
They must make enough new cells to grow without the cluster growing out of control. Understanding how this balance is held steady, across scales from molecules to whole tissues, could help efforts to improve how plants perform under changing conditions.
Why it matters
The shoot stem cells studied here produce all above-ground plant parts, which make up much of the biomass that sustains life on earth. Knowing how plants control the size and steadiness of this stem-cell pool could inform future efforts to improve crop performance under varying environments and support sustainable agriculture. The hybrid modeling approach may also apply to other biological systems that act across several scales.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Doris Wagner
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Plant Science & Agriculture
Identify the enhancers and transcription factors that switch on TERMINAL FLOWER1 (TFL1), the gene that keeps the shoot tip from becoming a flower, in the shoot apex, using inducible genetic tools and high-resolution spatial and temporal measurements.
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.
Jyoti Misra
Stony Brook University, NY·Genetics
Test how the endocytic machinery that internalizes surface proteins, together with a competitive inhibitor, establishes and maintains the spatial organization of Dachsous–Fat signaling across Drosophila tissues.
The school
University of California-Riverside: 21 labs on PI Pages, $232M a year on research, 328 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.