Past, present and future of plant development Bergmann Lab

Comparative development

Current: Marco D’Ario, Katelyn Hansen-McKown, Joel Erberich, Gabriel Amador

Alumni: Ido Nir, Michael Raissig, Yan Gong, Juliana Matos, Emily Abrash

Here we are harnessing new genome and genome engineering technologies to learn from the millions of years of experimentation and selection on stomata and leaf traits performed in nature. Return to Main Research

While Arabidopsis is a tractable system in which to identify stomatal regulatory genes and relationships, neither crop improvements nor climate change mitigation can be achieved without translation into other plants. It is a productive and exciting time to forge links between stomatal development and physiology at multiple scales and in diverse plant families. The parallel expansion of stomatal lineage complexity and stomatal bHLHs across the plant kingdom provides a powerful “natural laboratory” in which to analyze structure/function of individual proteins and evolution of their regulatory networks.  Additionally, technologies like efficient gene editing and many well-characterized and fully sequenced plant genomes,  there is now incredible power to look for local adaptation and dissect its genetic basis.

Nearly a decade ago we made our first foray into grass stomata. This family includes major food and fuel sources, and grasslands constitute major continental ecosystems. In the 400+ million year stomatal history, the greatest innovations to stomatal biomechanics and efficiency were in grasses. In partnership with John Vogel (JGI), forward genetic screens identified regulators of the major stomatal cell types and patterns.  Gene editing and construction of  cell-type specific Brachypodium reporters enabled us to find new roles for genes known from Arabidopsis and to capture transcriptome-level information about cell identities and transitions, making an interesting comparison to Arabidopsis, but also an anchor for defining critical regulators in cereal crops.

In addition to providing fundamental knowledge of stomatal development in grasses, the Brachypodium project was a test of our capacity to develop new plant models. We followed this with  projects in tomato that revealed how the same core stomatal regulator genes can be regulated in response to different environmental conditions.  Comparisons across plants let us better define the rules and the flexibility in plant systems. 

Some recent papers on this theme:

Expanded roles and divergent regulation of FAMA in Brachypodium and Arabidopsis stomatal development (2023) Katelyn McKown, lead author [link to PDF] 

Opposite polarity programs regulate asymmetric subsidiary cell divisions in grasses (2022) collaborative work with Michael Raissig’s group [link to PDF]

Evolution of polarity protein BASL and the capacity for stomatal lineage asymmetric divisions (2022) Ido Nir and Gabriel Amador, co-lead authors [link to PDF]