Sarah McKim
University of Dundee
Sarah McKim completed her PhD in floral developmental genetics with Prof George Haughn at the University of British Columbia. Following a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford, Sarah started her own group at the University of Dundee where she uses barley as a model system to investigate how cereals grow and develop. Underpinned by exploitation and generation of enabling technologies, Sarah’s research team has discovered genes and mechanisms controlling important architectural and agronomic traits, such as stem elongation, inflorescence branching and grain size and shape. One of her current projects examines how cereals coordinate multiple epidermal features important for resiliency and yield. In a major advance, Sarah’s team and collaborators identified a signalling pathway which jointly regulates epidermal cell patterning, including stomatal complex formation and spacing, and cuticle specialisations. Her research now aims to reveal possible mechanistic relationships explaining epidermal coordination and to evaluate how combinations of epidermal features impact crop performance.
Title of presentation
Waxing on about stomatal development: the interplay between adaptive epidermal features
Authors
Sarah M McKim, Linsan Liu, Trisha McAllister, Alasdair Iredale, Sarah B Jose, Verity Bonnell, Luke Ramsay, Micha M Bayer, Robbie Waugh, Alistair M Hetherington, James Cockram, Tansy Chia, Chiara Campoli, and Tracy Lawson
Division of Plant Sciences, University of Dundee
Abstract
Plants navigate multiple challenges on land via highly adaptive epidermal surfaces. Central to these are cuticles, waxy, reflective barriers secreted by outer epidermal cells which protect plants from water loss and irradiation, as well as stomata, open air cellular pores which interrupt the cuticle to permit and regulate photosynthetic gas exchange and transpiration. Epidermal surfaces contain other cell types, most abundantly the pavement cells, and others depending on the species and tissue. We are interested in how plants carefully arrange these diverse features into coherent and productive epidermal surfaces. We focus on the grasses, a group including our staple cereals, which develop extremely efficient 4-cell stomata and thick, waxy cuticles to help them in more arid environments. We propose that predictive variation in these adaptive features could support more resilient cereal crops. I will discuss our work revealing a shared upstream genetic network controlling epidermal cell patterning and cuticle properties in barley and a new project to: expand our understanding of the genetic network; chart the dynamics and control of cuticle and epidermal cell development; and their impact on cereal performance.
My Sessions
Waxing on about epidermal development: the interplay between adaptive epidermal features
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Presentation