Botanical Microscopy Meeting 2023

Enrico Coen

John Innes Centre

Talk title: Role of Mechanics in Coordination of Cell Behaviour in Plants

Professor Enrico Coen was born in Liverpool in 1957 and obtained a PhD in molecular genetics at Cambridge University in 1982.  After a postdoc at Cambridge, he moved to the John Innes Centre, Norwich in 1984 where he began using Antirrhinum as a model system to study plant development and evolution.  Based on the results of an extensive mutational screen, he proposed that the ground plan of a flower depends on the combinatorial action of homeotic genes acting along the radial and dorsoventral axes of the flower.  More recently, he has been using a combination of imaging and computational modelling to bridge the gaps between gene action, cell biology and development.  In addition to publishing in scientific journals, Enrico Coen has also tried to communicate some key principles in his area to a broad audience through articles in popular journals and in his books The Art of Genes and Cells to Civilizations, where he explores connections between science and art. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Keith Duncan

The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center

Talk title: Using lab-based X-ray microscopy for multiscale 3D imaging in plant biology

Keith Duncan is a research scientist in Dr. Chris Topp's lab at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Centre in St. Louis, Missouri (USA), and is Director of their X-ray imaging facility. Prior to the Danforth Centre, Keith joined Dr. Rick Howard's lab in 1990 at the DuPont Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware (USA), using light, laser, electron, and X-ray imaging technologies to study all aspects of agricultural cell biology. When that facility was closed in 2016 as a result of a corporate merger, Keith moved to St. Louis to join Chris Topp's lab and manage the newly opened X-ray imaging facility, one of the first in North America dedicated exclusively to studying plant biology. Keith has been using X-ray computed tomography (XCT) to study plant biology both above and below the soil line using conventional XCT as well as X-ray microscopy (XRM). In particular, Keith's research in the Topp lab is focused on using X-ray tomography to study root system architecture and root-microbe interactions. Keith is also involved in multiple collaborative research projects using XRM to study the morphology and cell biology of numerous plant structures.

Mark Fricker

University of Oxford

Talk title: Reliability, repeatability, reproducibility and responsibility

Mark Fricker started as a plant physiologist with Colin Willmer in Stirling on dissecting signal transduction pathways in stomatal physiology, and then quantitative imaging of Ca²⁺ in Edinburgh with Tony Trewavas and Nick Read. He continued with in vivo imaging of Ca²⁺, pH and redox dynamics in plant and then fungal systems after the move to Oxford sometime last century, which evolved into the current interest in signalling and transport in networked systems, and an IgNobel prize in 2010. Experimental investigations cover a range of scales including confocal ratio imaging on a micron scale, radiolabel scintillation imaging at an intermediate scale, and network analysis and mathematical modelling to predict behaviour across all scales. As part of this work, he has been developing  image analysis methods to quantify network architecture, dynamics and internal flows at different organisational scales, including sub-cellular ER networks, and macroscopic networks, such as fungi, slime molds, and leaf veins. The resultant fully-weighted network graphs then provide the input to predictive biophysical models to probe the mechanisms leading to the emergence of self-organised, adaptive behaviour. 

Laila Moubayidin

John Innes Centre

Talk title: Molecular and cellular mechanisms presiding over plant organ symmetry establishment

Dr. Laila Moubayidin is a Royal Society University Research Fellow leading her independent group at the John Innes Centre, in Norwich.

In 2007 she graduated in Biology at the University of Rome “Sapienza” (Italy) studying the role of the CSN-committed protein degradation processes during plant embryogenesis.

In 2011, she received her PhD in Genetics and Molecular Biology at the University of Rome “Sapienza” (Italy), which was funded by a university fellowship. During her PhD, Dr. Moubayidin investigated the regulatory networks controlling the shift from meristematic to differentiating cells, which controls the balance between cell division and cell differentiation in the Arabidopsis root meristem.

In 2013, Dr. Moubayidin joined the John Innes Centre as a post-doc to study the molecular and genetic mechanisms establishing radial symmetry during the development of the female reproductive organ of Arabidopsis, the gynoecium.

In 2018 Dr. Moubayidin was awarded a prestigious Fellowship from the Royal Society which allowed her to set up an independent research group at the John Innes Centre, since January 2019. Currently, her group is investigating the biological rules presiding over the regulation of symmetric shapes during plant organ development, using Arabidopsis roots, leaves and flower organs as developmental tools.

Marisa Otegui

Center for Quantitative Cell Imaging, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Talk title: Understanding the Evolution of Endosomal Sorting Mechanisms in Plants

Marisa Otegui obtained her PhD degree in University of La Plata Argentina. She did her postdoctoral training in University of Colorado-Boulder working on electron tomography imaging and plant cytokinesis. She joined University of Wisconsin Madison as an Assistant Professor of Botany in 2004. Her laboratory focuses on the mechanisms that regulate membrane and protein trafficking and degradation in plants and how they control plant development. She has combined multiple approaches to understand the degradation of cellular components through the endosomal pathway and autophagy (self-cellular eating). The Otegui lab uses both fluorescence–based imaging and transmission electron microscopy and electron tomography of high-pressure frozen cells for three-dimensional cellular analysis. She is currently working on endosomal membrane remodeling in Arabidopsis in the context of plant development and autophagy in maize to understand nutrient recycling. Besides microscopy imaging, her laboratory uses genetic, omics, molecular, and biochemical tools to manipulate gene expression and understand gene function. She teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in plant molecular and cell biology, organizes conference and workshops on cell imaging, and participate in the editorial board of scientific journals. 

Thomas Ott

University of Freiburg Faculty of Biology

Talk title: Visualizing and understanding rhizobia infections

Thomas studied biology at the Universities of Göttingen (Germany) and Manchester (UK). He did his doctoral thesis in the group of Michael Udvardi at the Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Golm (Germany) from 2001-2005 before he obtained a postdoctoral Marie-Curie Fellowship of the European Union to conduct a two-years project (2006-2007) at the Laboratoire des Interactions Plantes Micro-organismes (LIPM), INRA-CNRS in Toulouse (France) in the lab of Pascal Gamas and Andreas Niebel. In 2008, he moved as a junior group leader to the University of Munich (LMU) into the department of Martin Parniske. After being awarded an Emmy-Noether Fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in October 2009, he started his independent lab in the same place. Thomas then followed the appointments as a professor at the LMU in 2015 and moved in October 2016 to the University of Freiburg where he currently holds the chair in Plant Cell Biology and focusses his research on the intracellular infection of legumes roots by bacteria.

Nick Talbot

The Sainsbury Laboratory

Talk title: Investigating the Cell Biology of Rice Infection by the Blast Fungus Magnaporthe oryzae

Professor Nick Talbot is Executive Director of The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich. His research is focused on the biology of plant diseases and he utilises a range of cell biology, genetics and genomics approaches in his work. Nick is interested in understanding how fungi are able to invade plants using specialised infection structures called appressoria, how plant tissue is invaded, and how fungi suppress plant immunity. His main contributions have been in understanding plant infection by the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae. Rice blast disease destroys up to a third of the annual global rice harvest – enough rice to feed 60 million people. It is therefore an important economic and humanitarian problem. 
 
Nick received his PhD in Molecular Genetics from the University of East Anglia. After postdoctoral research at Purdue University in the USA, he moved to the University of Exeter as a Lecturer, later becoming Professor of Molecular Genetics, Head of the School of Biosciences, and Deputy Vice Chancellor. He joined The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich as Executive Director in 2018. He has authored more than 170 publications. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, a member of EMBO, a member of Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of The Royal Society. He is one of the four current Gatsby Plant Science Advisors.
 

Dolf Weijers

Wageningen University & Research Laboratory of Biochemistry

Talk title: Cell polarity - the nexus of shape, mechanics and morphogenesis?

Dolf Weijers is professor and chair of Biochemistry at Wageningen University (the Netherlands). He obtained his PhD at Leiden University and spent 4 years as post-doc in Tübingen before starting his research group in Wageningen in 2006. His team studies the mechanisms underlying multicellular development in plants, often using the early embryo as a model. Recent focus is on establishment of cell polarity and asymmetric cell division.