Submitted by Helen C. Scott on Wed, 10/07/2013 - 14:51
Herschel-Smith Post-Doctoral Fellowship for Edwige Moyroud
The fellowship is for 3 years. The projects aims at understanding how living organisms build photonic structures that generate structural colours. Using the tools Edwige recently developed for Hibiscus, she will specifically try to understand how the interplay between cytoskeleton reorganisation, cell wall deformation and cuticle production, can generate a nanopattern with sufficient accuracy on the surface of the petal that it interferes with light to generate an iridescent signal used as a cue by foraging insect pollinators.
NERC Independent Research Fellowship for Samuel Brockington
The fellowship is for 5 years. The project aims to understand how green plants colonized the terrestrial environment. Specifically, Sam will be looking at the evolution of the land plant cuticle, and its subsequent interaction with structures regulating gaseous exchange - stomata and air pores. He will be looking at the functions and responses of the cuticle in early land plants relative to higher plants. He will also determine the key genes regulating cuticle development in early land plants, and examine the genetic basis of cuticular interactions with gaseous exchange structures. The research will yield further insight into molecular mechanisms affecting global processes such as transpiration.
Other lab news
Katrina Alcorn - is runner-up for the Functional Ecology JBS Haldane Young Investigator's Prize
Lin Taylor - attended a two week course at the Arnold Arborteum/Harvard University: "Plant Morphology: Linking Phenotype to Development"
Celia Martinez - awarded a Synthesys grant to work with Antirrhinum collections in Madrid