Date: 2023-10-12

Time: 14:00-15:00 (UK time)

Strand S5.20

Abstract

Plants undergo several key developmental transitions, such as the decision to flower, that farmers would like to synchronise to maximise their yields. In this talk I will describe (i) a novel experimental design to understand how these transitions happen and (ii) a novel application of functional data analysis to help farmers breed more synchronised crops. To understand the biological regulation that leads to these transition points, a high temporal resolution of sampling would be required; however, the degree of developmental asynchrony makes such an experiment difficult to design. Instead, we sample a large collection of individual plants at the transition point and then estimate their age retroactively with a bootstrapping strategy, enabling us to order the plants along a pseudotime, giving us an unprecedented level of detail of the cascade of biological events that lead to the initiation of flowering. We then hypothesised that plants that are more sensitive to changes in day length (as occur in the spring and autumn) would have more synchronised development. Using functional data analysis approaches, we developed a predictive model of flowering synchrony on the basis of how the circadian rhythms of plants respond to changes in day length, in a population of plants with parents adapted from different latitudes. We are further adapting FDA methods to identify genetic loci that are significantly associated with these clock-related traits, which can be used to direct crop breeding for synchronised development.

Speaker

Daphne Ezer studied Computer Science at Duke University and then earned a PhD in Genetics at the University of Cambridge. This was followed by a Research Associate position at the Sainsbury Laboratory and an Alan Turing Institute and EPSRC Innovation Fellowship at the Alan Turing Institute/University of Warwick statistics department. She is currently a Lecturer in Computational Biology at the University of York and for the first time is running her own experimental lab.