RESEARCH

Research groups

Professor Claire Grierson

group: Plant and Pathogen Biology
lab: Root Development

Research career

My first degree at the University of Warwick included a year in a bioscience research group at ICI, Runcorn. During my PhD with Dr Mike Bevan at Cambridge University and the John Innes Centre I studied mechanisms controlling potato tuber development, and identified transcription factors controlling the expression of storage protein genes. Since then I have worked on root development in Arabidopsis, firstly as a post-doctoral researcher with Dr Liam Dolan and Professor Keith Roberts at the John Innes Centre and later as a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow at IACR-Long Ashton. I became a lecturer at Bristol in 2000 and a Reader in 2004. I enjoy collaborating with researchers in other disciplines, through the Predictive Life Sciences theme, and the Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences, with the goal of understanding biological systems better.

Arabidopsis

Research interests

I am interested in development and differentiation. At the moment we work mainly on root hair development in Arabidopsis seedlings. Topics include the role of auxin in plant cell growth, and the subcellular networks that drive tip growth in root hair cells.

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Lay summary of research interests

We know that life is the product of complicated physical and chemical interactions between molecules, but how do these produce growth, and how is this growth controlled so that it happens at precisely the right times and in the right places? We are working to answer these questions using plants and microbes because it is easier, technically and ethically, to do powerful, informative experiments with these organisms than with animals. We often identify new molecules that are important for growth in many organisms. We are also finding out how interactions between molecules control growth. Our results are potentially relevant to a wide range of applications from agriculture to human health and we are exploring potential agricultural applications.

Research-related roles

 

iGEM 

I co-founded the University of Bristol iGEM team with Mario Di Bernardo. Each spring a joint undergraduate and postgraduate Synthetic Biology workshop is held in preparation for iGEM. The team then works through the summer on a competition entry for the  international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). So far we have been very successful, winning the Best Model prize in 2008 and 2009, gold medals in 2009 and 2010, and winning Best Food or Energy Project and third place overall in 2010. Projects have included engineering bacteria to work as a team Bristol iGEM 2008, Bristol iGEM 2009, and beads containing fluorescent bacteria that are designed to make agriculture less environmentally damaging Bristol iGEM 2010.

 

Research opportunities

Network Evolution

 

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