"Understanding the cellular and organ-scale mechanisms plants use to survive with limited water."

Co-sponsored by the Center for Root and Rhizosphere Biology

Abstract:
The invasion of land by plants required the evolution of a host of mechanisms plants use to survive in the face of a heterogeneous and limited supply of fresh water. Research in the Dinneny lab is focused on understanding how cellular and developmental processes contribute to these adaptive mechanisms. At the cellular scale, I will present work that focuses on the mechanisms that protect cells from the organizational disruption following hyperosmotic stress. Plant cells maintain association between the plasma membrane and cell wall through attachments and loss of these attachments leads to greater sensitivity to stress. I will also highlight work focusing on how crop roots sense and respond to spatial heterogeneity in soil water through the local regulation of branching and root anatomy. Together, these studies highlight the multi-scale nature of plant-environmental response mechanisms and identify pathways that may inform crop improvement.

About the Speaker:
José Dinneny earned his BS in Plant Biology and Genetics from UC Berkeley. He pursued his Ph.D. at UC San Diego, under Detlef Weigel at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Martin Yanofsky in the Division of Biology, focusing on molecular genetic processes governing plant organ shape. As a post-doc, he joined the lab of Philip Benfey at Duke University, pioneering the use of Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorting (FACS) to create the first tissue-specific map of transcriptional changes during abiotic stress. José established his independent lab at the Temasek Lifesciences Laboratory (TLL) in Singapore, concurrently affiliated with the National University of Singapore's Department of Biological Sciences. In 2011, he moved his lab to the Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Plant Biology, and in 2018, he joined Stanford University as a Professor in the Biology Department. In 2024 he became an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Over 16 years, Dinneny's research has revealed novel plant adaptations to water-related stresses, with broad physiological and agricultural implications. He unraveled developmental and molecular mechanisms, introduced innovative imaging and robotics approaches for plant-environment studies, and pioneered synthetic biology tools for precise plant engineering.

José's accolades include Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, AAAS Fellow, HHMI-Simons Faculty Scholar, National Research Foundation of Singapore fellow, NIH Ruth Kirschstein post-doctoral fellow, and HHMI predoctoral fellow. He was featured in Science News magazine's "2017 SN 10: Scientists to Watch" list and honored in 2023 with the Charles Albert Shull award by the American Society of Plant Biologists.

Contact

  Vyankatesh Zambare
  vdz5005@psu.edu