Prof. Ueli Grossniklaus - Plant Developmental Genetics

The long-term goal of our research is to elucidate the molecular basis of plant reproduction with a focus on cell specification, cell-cell communication, and epigenetic gene regulation. We cover diverse aspects of reproduction at the physical, molecular, cellular, organismal, and ecological level. We are interested in the signaling processes regulating pollen tube growth and reception and identified many players of a novel, plant-specific signal transduction pathway, which turned out to be involved in a multitude of physiological and developmental processes. We also made significant contributions towards elucidating the role of epigenetics in seed development and are interested in ecological and evolutionary aspects, in particular in the stability and inheritance of epigenetic variation. Finally, considerable effort is placed on the engineering of apomixis, the clonal reproduction through seeds, which has tremendous potential for agriculture.

Over the last decade, our research has become increasingly interdisciplinary, including collaborations with ecologists, evolutionary biologists, engineers and physicists. This has allowed us to develop novel approaches to address fundamental questions, e.g., how physical contraints affect cellular morphogenesis or how the mode of reproduction affects genome evolution.