FATE

Project Summary

The aim of the FATE (Decoding cell fate with positional information) project is to explore how plant cells get their "identity", how different types of cells emerge in the right place and at the right time during plant development. Although carefully studied in animals, this mechanism is still poorly understood in plants.

Animals and plants grow and develop as a result of controlled cellular processes such as division, elongation, and differentiation, where cell differentiation is defined as the acquisition of identity for a specific cell. While a number of genes are known to control the acquisition of identity in plants, we still do not know how these genes are activated.

Positional information is regarded to be a crucial component of this regulatory process: we know that cell identity or cell fate acquisition is dependent on a cell's relative position within the complex organism. However, it remains unknown which signals govern cell destiny determination and how.

This project will lead is to contribute to the basic understanding of cell identity determination processes by working on root hair cells in the outer cell layer of the root. In addition, the researchers plan to develop for the first time an artificial model of an Arabidopsis thaliana root – a “plant-on-chip” – inspired by a new method where models of human organs are assembled and studied on a microchip.