Pleun Langerwerf
PhD Candidate
PhD candidate at the Gardiner Lab
That's random: exploring mechanisms behind stochastic patterns in plants
Plants are, by definition, fixed-rooted organisms鈥攖he inability to move around limits their options to adapt to a changing environment. One of the crucial mechanisms they possess to this end is tuning the amount of random changes in their genes. A random change can lead to beneficial new traits, or disastrous disruptions in the plant's physiology. Petunia species with random speckle patterns provide a model to investigate the regulation mechanism of random patterns. These insights can then be applied to discover and develop new stable variations for crop breeding.
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