报告题目：Plants: from thermal responses to human genetic diseases 

　　报告人：Sureshkumar Balasubramanian, Associate Professor, School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Australia 

　　时  间：2018年1月12日（星期五）下午 14:30-15:30 

　　地  点：中国科学院遗传与发育生物学研究所 1号楼二层第一、第二会议室 

　　联系人：曹晓风（010-64806632） 

　　Sureshkumar Balasubramanian教授的研究主要聚焦两个方面：1）植物对温度变化的响应机制的研究；2）植物病害的分子机制研究。截止目前，主要研究成果发表在Science, Nature Genetics, Nature Plants, Current Biology, PLoS Genetics, PNAS, Nucleic Acids Research, Development等国际重要期刊上。 

　　报告摘要：Ambient temperature influences plant growth and development and minor changes can substantially impact crop yields. The underlying mechanisms for temperature perception and response are just beginning to emerge. My lab works on two different aspects of thermal response. First, we are determing the molecular mechanisms that mediate thermomorphogenesis in plants. I will present our recent work related to temperature induced flowering and hypocotyl elongation in Arabidopsis and propose some new models for thermal response.  Second aspect of our work relates to cryptic genetic variation, which is revealed upon elevated thermal regimes. One such CGV resulted in the identification of a triplet repeat expansion, which causes transcriptional down regulation. Triplet expansion mediated transcriptional down regulation underlies a human genetic disease referred to as Friedreich's ataxia. My lab has been exploiting Arabidopsis model to understand the fundamental mechanisms associated with triplet expansion mediated transcriptional down regulation and I will present our recent findings.