Epigenetics: plants can 'remember' winter - Caroline Dean

Ever stopped to think why plants of the same species all flower at the same time? What trigger is causing this to happen in thousands of individual organisms at the same time? This tight control aligns sensitive developmental steps with favourable environmental conditions, so maximizing reproductive success. Plants use seasonal cues to judge when winter is over and good times are ahead. These cues are driven by light and exposure to prolonged cold; plants need to integrate fluctuating temperature signals over many months and not get confused by a short period of cold in autumn. The sensing and remembering of long-term temperature exposure is a process known as vernalization. Here, Caroline Dean explains how plants use and remember temperature cues to time their flowering.

00:00 Welcome from Caroline
00:30 How do the same plants flower at the same time?
06:29 How can plants tell the temperature?
09:16 The timing of flowering in plants
11:15 What is vernalisation?
13:45 Flowering Locus C (FLC)
18:44 How plants 'remember' the winter
20:33 Introduction to epigenetics
29:16 The genetics of vernalisation
33:25 Experimental data
35:26 Why vernalisation takes all winter
43:17 Natural variation and climate change

Speaker profile: "I was inspired to do biology as a teenager by watching TV programmes on marine biology featuring Jacques Cousteau. It was a second year undergraduate practical on studying electron transport in isolated chloroplasts that got me hooked on plants. I did my PhD at the University of York on chloroplast development in wheat and then moved to California to work at a small start-up plant biotech company Advanced Genetic Sciences. It was a very exciting time in plant biology, learning how to transform plants and get transgenes to work. After five years (in 1988) I moved to take up a Principle Investigator position at the John Innes Centre (JIC) at the beginning of the international Arabidopsis ‘era’. In the early years at JIC, the lab was heavily involved in developing genetic and physical mapping tools and co-ordinating the UK Arabidopsis programme (ARAB-UK)."

Filmed at the Gatsby Plant Science Summer School, 2017.