MicroRNA functions in Arabidopsis embryos

Speaker: Dr. Michael Nodine, Group leader at Gregor Mendel Institute, Vienna Biocenter, Austria
Host: Peter Brodersen, Section for Computational and RNA Biology, BIO-UCPH

Abstract
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small regulatory RNAs that repress key developmental regulators and are essential for plant embryo development. Previously we found that miRNA-deficient embryos exhibit widespread differentiation defects and precociously express maturation-phase genes. This indicates that miRNAs are required for both embryonic pattern formation and the timing of the morphogenesis-to-maturation phase transition. Because plant miRNAs typically repress transcription factors and other key developmental regulators they likely have a large influence on the gene regulatory networks that control plant embryogenesis. Our major goal is to understand how miRNAs shape the transcriptional programs that govern cellular differentiation and patterning, and I will present how we are developing and implementing genome-wide approaches to achieve this aim.