Host: Professor Ikram Blilou

Abstract: 
Understanding how plant cells decide where to respond, when to respond and what type of transcriptional response they should give to a developmental signal is at the heart of our interrogations on how plant hormones drive the dynamic construction of plants and developmental responses to environmental stimuli. We will discuss our recent findings on this topic, taking examples of regulations of patterning by auxin and gibberellins in both root and shoot meristems. 

Bio: 
After a predoc in Ghent, I did my PhD at INRAE in Versailles before moving on for a postdoc at Duke University. I established my group at the RDP in Lyon in 2005. My research is focused on robustness and self-organization of developmental processes in plants. I explore these questions by addressing primarily the role of plant hormones in patterning and morphogenesis at the shoot apical meristem. I am using interdisciplinary approaches ranging from quantitative live imaging, biosensor development, functional genomics, biochemistry and structural biology to modeling, in order to unravel how these developmental regulators act across scale to build a robust shoot architecture.