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lab profile
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Beverley Glover University of Cambridge
Department of Plant Sciences
Downing Street
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire CB2 3EA
United Kingdom
bjg26@cam.ac.uk
44 1223 333938
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| PI: |
YES |
| Taxa Studied: |
Plants, Invertebrate Animals |
| Techniques Employed: |
Degenerate PCR, Quantitative PCR (qPCR), 454 Pyrosequencing, Solexa (Illumina) Sequencing, Bioinformatics/Sequence Analysis, In Situ Hybridization, Sectioning for Histology, Sectioning for Electron Microscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy, Confocal Microscopy, Transgenesis, Mutagenesis, Other, RNA interference(RNAi), Bumblebee behavioral assays |
| Research Description: |
Plant development is a much more plastic process than animal development, and, because it is environmentally entrained, fits individual plants to their particular habitat. Our objective is to understand the ways in which single gene products control different aspects of plant development and thus contribute to the fitness of plants. We are also interested in the evolution of developmental programmes, looking at the sequence and function of key genes throughout the plant kingdom, in an effort to associate molecular changes with morphological transitions. Much of our molecular work is carried out using model plant species, such as Arabidopsis thaliana and Antirrhinum majus, but our evolutionary work extends throughout the plant kingdom. Our main area of interest at the moment is the evolution and development of floral traits that are important in attracting animal pollinators, and our lab incorporates a bee behavioural facility to explore pollinator responses to the morphologies we study. We are currently exploring the evolution of flower colour in Antirrhinum, the development and function of floral iridescence, evolutionary shifts in petal epidermal morphology in the Solanaceae and Legumes, the evolutionary re-acquistion of petals in the Caryophyllales and the development of insect-attracting petal spots on South African daisies. |
| Lab Web Page: |
http://www.plantsci.cam.ac.uk/research/beverleyglover.html |
| Willing to Host Undergraduates: |
YES |
| Actively Seeking Undergraduates: |
NO |
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