New strategies and tools are required to maintain the yield of processing tomatoes in California, which accounts for 90% of national tomato production. As part of their long-term strategic planning, over the last two years the California Tomato Research Institute (CTRI) generously awarded our proposal to investigate the effect of enhanced suberin deposition in tomatoes as a strategy to…
In contrast with flowering plants, earlier studies have hypothesized that successive rotating division planes of a single apical cell directly determine phyllotaxis of the moss Physcomitrium patens, with each apical cell derivative directly generating a leaf. This provides a simple system to understand how the geometry of a single apical cell and its daughter cells, their…
Most mosses rely on external water transport and absorption over the entire plant surface a condition known as ectohydry. Morphological structures (i.e., papillae) facilitate water uptake by capillary action; however, the way these water-related traits develop, function, and/or reflect adaptation to different environmental regimes is an area that remains poorly understood in mosses. This research…
Branched broomrape (Phelipanche ramosa), a parasitic weed, was the target of a $1.5 million eradication campaign in California four decades ago. However, it has recently re-emerged in tomato fields across several counties in California’s Central Valley. We use in vitro and in vivo approaches to co-cultivate commercial tomato lines with broomrape and collect genetic data on…
The goals of this project are to map the genetic pathway that produces the exodermis and its barrier, to show how the barrier regulates the transport of specific mineral ions and to determine how the barrier functions to help a plant tolerate drought stress. This approach will be directly integrated as a Course-Based Undergraduate Research…
Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal (AMF) symbioses were critical to plant migration to land and conserved pathways associated with this symbiosis have been identified. It is proposed that association of plant root systems with beneficial fungi, like AMF, can improve crop resilience to water deficit. In this project, two crops that are phylogenetically distinct and critical to…
