Plantae Presents: Claudia Köhler and Sunil K. Kenchanmane Raju

Plantae Presents – Claudia Köhler and Sunil K. Kenchanmane Raju

Wednesday October 14 10am EDT, 4pm CET

 

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Claudia Köhler: Epigenetic regulation in the endosperm drives plant speciation

Claudia Köhler is a Professor of Molecular Cell Biology at the Department of Plant Biology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). She obtained her PhD at the University of Freiburg in Germany. She is member of EMBO, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Her lab has a general interest in genetic and epigenetic mechanisms governing seed development and plant speciation. Her main research focus is the endosperm, the tissue that supports embryo growth, similar to the role of the placenta in mammals. Research goals of her lab are to decipher the role of the endosperm in controlling seed growth, regulating embryo development, as well as establishing barriers towards interspecies and interploidy hybridizations. @ClaudiaKohler11

 

 

 

 

 

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Sunil K. Kenchanmane Raju: DNA methylation signatures of duplicate gene evolution in angiosperms

Sunil Kenchanmane Raju is a postdoc in the Department of Plant Biology at Michigan State University. His research interests focus on plant resilience to climate change, particularly focusing on understanding chromatin dynamics and epigenomic variation in stress-adapted crop-wild relatives. Sunil received his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he showed the utility of induced epigenetic variation in plant breeding for yield and stability related traits in soybean and Arabidopsis. Sunil is an active member of the American Society of Plant Biologists, serving as a Plant Cell Assistant Features Editor and is currently the Outgoingchair of the ASPB Ambassador Alliance. He also co-founded Plant Postdocs, a community for postdocs in plant-related fields preparing for a career in academia and industry. @Sunil_KumarKR

 

 

 

 

 

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Moderated by Matthias Benoit

Matthias is an HHMI post-doctoral fellow working in Zach Lippman’s group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (New York, USA). He completed a PhD in Molecular Genetics and Physiology with Aline V. Probst at Clermont Auvergne University (France), where he studied histone variants and chromatin dynamics during early seedling development in Arabidopsis. He then joined Jurek Paszowski’s group at the Sainsbury Laboratory (University of Cambridge, UK) to characterize transposons subjected to developmental and environmental activation in tomato. Matthias’ current and future research aim at understanding the significance of genomic and epigenetic variation in tomato development and breeding. Matthias is an Assistant Features Editor at the Plant Cell and actively involved in mentoring students and promoting science communication through public outreach events, ASPB Plantae and Twitter @Matt_Ben_

 

 

 

 

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