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Ottoline Leyser: The Future of Plant Life - Schrödinger at 75: The Future of Biology

1,002 views · Published 20 November 2018 · 30:30 · Indexed 25 September 2026

Channel: Trinity College Dublin · 2018 · Education

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Leyser received her BA (1986) and PhD (1990) in Genetics from the University of Cambridge. After post-doctoral research at Indiana University and Cambridge, she took up a lectureship at the University of York, where she worked from 1994-2010. She is Director of Sainsbury Laboratory at University of Cambridge. The Leyser Group’s research is aimed at understanding the role of plant hormones in plant developmental plasticity, using the regulation of shoot branching as a model. Axillary meristems, which are established in each leaf axil formed from the primary shoot apical meristem, can remain dormant or activate to produce a branch. The decision to activate or not involves integration of diverse environmental, physiological and developmental inputs, and is mediated by a network of interacting hormonal signals that generate a rich source of systemically transmitted information, which is locally interpreted to regulate branching. At its hub is the polar auxin transport system, which extends throughout the plant, transporting auxin basipetally from shoot apices to the roots. The system is dynamically modeled and remodeled by auxin itself. Leyser and her team are working to understand the dynamic properties of this hormonal network and their implications for adaptive developmental plasticity. Leyser was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2017. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation and the Leopoldina. She is Chair of the British Society for Developmental Biology, and of the Royal Society’s Science Policy Advisory Group. She is Co-Editor in Chief of Current Opinions in Plant Biology and an Editor of Development. She is a Fellow of Clare College.

http://www.tcd.ie/

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