Dr. Dominique Bergmann's lab uses the stomatal lineage as a model system to study and understand fundamental biological processes. They are interested in how living systems can be flexible and adaptable, yet still create functional tissues that follow certain patterning rules. They typically ask mechanistic questions for which they design wet-lab experiments to test, however, they increasingly rely on modeling and genetic associations. The lab is enthusiastic about collaborating with mathematicians, physicists, engineers, population geneticists, global ecologists, teachers and citizen-scientists who bring complementary expertise and viewpoints to complex problems in biology.
The lab centers their approaches on the small weedy plant Arabidopsis because of the powerful experimental tools and collegial worldwide research community, and because its stomatal lineage is complex enough to provide interesting questions, but simple enough to hope to get answers to them. We also find comparative approaches illuminating and thus look at variation--among populations of wild Arabidopsis, among other plants, and between plants and other kingdoms. They think it's important to test how the genes and pathways we uncover in lab settings translate to economically and ecologically important plants like tomatoes and cereal grasses.
Generating the full complement of functional cell types requires coordinating the production of cells with the specification programs that distinguish one cell type from another. Asymmetric cell division, in which one cell divides to create daughter cells that differ in size, location, cellular components or fate, is extensively used in the development of animals. In development of the epidermis in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, the specification and distribution of stomatal guard cells also requires oriented cell divisions.
By studying stomatal development, one can explore how cells choose to initiate asymmetric divisions, how cells establish an internal polarity that can be translated into an asymmetric cell division, and how cells interpret external cues to align their divisions relative to the polarity of the whole tissue. Moreover, approaching these questions in a plant system is likely to reveal new solutions to the problem of balancing the robust specification of cell types with the ability to change development in the face of injury or environmental change.
