Saunders Genetics Lecture 2024

Mon 19 February

Babbage Lecture Theatre

We are delighted to welcome Professor Dame Caroline Dean, Royal Society Professor at the John Innes Centre, Norwich as our speaker for the 2024 Saunders Lecture. The title of Caroline's talk is “Co-transcriptional and memory mechanisms registering winter.”

Professor Dame Caroline Dean is a Royal Society Professor at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, which she joined as a group leader after a PhD at the University of York and postdoctoral work at Advanced Genetic Sciences in the USA. Caroline has made outstanding contributions to understanding developmental timing in plants with a particular focus on how plants remember and respond to environmental cues. She is the recipient of several distinguished awards, including the Royal Society Darwin (2016) and Royal (2020) Medals, The Genetics Society Medal (2007), the FEBS/EMBO Women in Science Award (2015), the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award (2018) and the Wolf Prize in Agriculture (2020). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a member of EMBO, US National Academy of Sciences and the German National Academy of Sciences.

Caroline will discuss her work on how organisms extract signals from noisy environments. Plants are an excellent system to investigate this question as many aspects of the environment regulate their growth and development. Naturally fluctuating temperature signals are registered throughout winter in the process of vernalization, to align flowering with favourable spring conditions. In Arabidopsis, vernalization involves the epigenetic silencing of the floral repressor FLC. Molecular dissection of this mechanism has revealed that temperature sensing is distributed throughout the FLC regulatory network. Multiple facets of the fluctuating temperature profile are monitored, directly through co-transcriptional changes of FLC sense and antisense transcription, and indirectly through reduced cell division. These changes are integrated via a low probability Polycomb-mediated chromatin switch, locally at each allele. The talk will describe our understanding of this switching mechanism, aspects of which are likely to be relevant to other organisms, where complex environmental cues mediate epigenetic regulation.

In addition, we will a hold a ceremony to unveil Genetics Society Blue Plaques honouring Edith Saunders and William Bateson. As well as a Blue Plaque to celebrate the Nobel prize work completed by Sir Martin Evans in the Department of Genetics building.

Cost: Free