Venkatesan Sundaresan
University of California-Davis, CA·Plant Science & Agriculture
Hybrid seeds, made by crossing two different plant varieties, give higher yields and better disease tolerance. But they must be remade every season by laborious crossing, which keeps them expensive.
- Fields
Plant Science & Agriculture
Genetics
Biology
- Topics
maize
rice
Arabidopsis
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Generate diploid, unrecombined gametes in maize by editing multiple genes required for cell division and meiosis, testing whether cis-regulatory elements are conserved between meiosis and mitosis.
- Introduce selected rice cell-division genes into maize to substitute mitosis for meiosis, a key step toward synthetic apomixis (seed-based cloning) of hybrid maize.
- Optimize methods to isolate egg cells and zygotes and to profile histone marks from low cell numbers in Arabidopsis, then apply them to rice gametes and zygotes.
- Integrate rice chromatin data with existing mRNA, DNA methylation and small RNA datasets to build a genome-scale atlas of epigenetic reprogramming from gamete to zygote, including parent-of-origin gene expression.
More about the research
Plants that could clone themselves through seed would keep a hybrid's winning gene combination forever. Both projects study the moment when gametes (egg and sperm cells) give rise to a new plant. The goal is to understand and engineer that step for crops.
Why it matters
Hybrid seeds that reproduce as clones could cut the cost of hybrid maize and other crops, making high-yield varieties more affordable for farmers. Knowing how plant zygotes are epigenetically programmed could also support haploid production to speed up breeding, clonal propagation of crops, and regeneration of plants from tissue culture.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michael Lampson
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Genetics
Test whether maternal proteins that activate the paternal genome mismatch with fast-evolving paternal transposons, causing abnormal gene expression in hybrid mouse embryos, using transcriptional and epigenomic profiling of 2-cell embryos.
Wei Cui
University of Massachusetts, MA·Biology
Define how loss of maternal MCM4, part of the helicase that unwinds DNA for copying, blocks zygotic DNA replication, using oocyte-specific Mcm4 knockout mice and EdU labeling of new DNA.
Robert Schmitz
University of Georgia, GA·Genetics
Map accessible chromatin at single-cell resolution across multiple maize genetic backgrounds to identify cell-type-specific regulatory regions and transcription factor binding events.
The school
University of California-Davis: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 647 research doctorates a year.
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