Plant cells are totipotent, meaning individual cells have the potential to develop into a full organism, a property unique to the zygote for animals. However, in most species for most cells, plant cells are not spontaneously totipotent, since they must be treated with specific hormone combinations to unlock their totipotency. Species within the Kalanchoe genus is unique as they spontaneously develop foliar embryos that are fully realized plantlets with shoot and root from notches along the edges of leaves. We speculate that the progenitor cells that give rise to these foliar embryos are totipotent, and we are using single cell techniques to identify & characterize them. In addition to being a fundamental process for plant biology, we foresee unlocking totipotency has many biotechnological applications, such as faciliating genetic transformation and the development of synthetic organs of biomanufacturing.

Here is a brief post about our recent paper on using PCA to visualise large pedigrees. This is the result of a collaboration between Hanbin Lee (University of Michigan) and colleagues at the Roslin…

Background Pedigrees continue to be extremely important in agriculture and conservation genetics, with the pedigrees of modern breeding programmes easily comprising millions of records. This size can ...

We are looking to fill a post for postdoctoral fellow in population and quantitative genomics within the BBSRC-funded HiPerBreedSim project. In this role, you will leverage recent advances in working ...

Abstract. A new approach to modeling the effects of Hill-Robertson interference on levels of adaptation and patterns of variability in a non-recombining ge

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) has two main subspecies, indica and japonica , which coexist in many regions but are often treated separately during breeding. Combining both subspecies in quantitative genetic ...

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2024 has been a great year for the common liverwort (Marchantia polymorpha) in Edinburgh. It is almost everywhere you look. I started collecting M. polymorpha in 2021. During the subsequent years, I r...