I recently completed my PhD in Dr. Robin Cameron’s lab (McMaster University, Canada), where I studied phloem-mediated long-distance immune signalling induced by a bacterial pathogen in Arabidopsis thaliana. Feeling a need to branch out a little, I joined Dr. Sebastian Schornack’s group (Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK) to study interactions between filamentous microbes and non-vascular early land plants. Our goal is to identify core developmental processes required for the colonization of early land plant tissues by filamentous microbes and to understand how these processes evolved into the defense and symbiotic programs employed by higher plants. Our work will generate transcriptomics data, fluorescent marker lines and microbe inducible promoters for cell biology, and other molecular-genetic tools that will enable the OpenPlant community to explore early land plant biology.
Ms Marta Tomaselli
I did my bachelor and master in Biotechnology in Pisa, where I discovered how fascinating plants can be. In the past, I have worked with CRISPR/Cas9 system in two different plant models: Arabidopsis thaliana and Marchantia polymorpha. These were my first experiences related to synthetic biology and they, really, got me involved into it.
In September 2016 I started as an OpenPlant PhD student at the University of Cambridge. In my first year I will do three lab rotations before beginning my final PhD project. During my first rotation in the Haseloff Lab, I have been developing microscopy techniques to image M. polymorpha gemmae. These tools will allow to retain the signal coming from fluorescent proteins in fixed samples and exploit them to achieve a 3D representation of the plant tissue.
For my second rotation, I moved to a different topic, working in the Schornack lab. This project focuses on plant-pathogen interactions: we are looking for pathogen-responsive promoters in M. polymorpha. These sequences can be exploited to generate new reporter lines.
In the future, I would like to continue working with Marchantia and exploit this plant as a model to implement new synthetic circuits. I think that the OpenPlant Community is a great resource for a PhD student, since a lot of different topics are covered by senior researchers to whom you can ask questions and suggestions about your own project.