description
- Plants are sessile organisms that are regularly exposed to a wide variety of abiotic and biotic stress conditions. Tolerance to fluctuating environmental conditions are thought to require rapid epigenomic modifications to facilitate dynamic changes in global gene expression. These changes are frequently observed to be intergenerationally inherited but show a higher degree of inheritance via asexual reproduction in plants. Using an inducible embryonic factor system our lab can trigger somatic embryogenesis in a variety of plant tissues. During my PhD I will be studying how tissue of origin effects the epigenomic inheritance of stress tolerance marks following somatic embryogenesis. Following this we will investigate what epigenetic factors are involved in this mode of inheritance and aim to utilize this knowledge to enhance stress tolerance in Arabidopsis and a variety of other crop species such as Wheat and Rice.