Know more

Development is remarkably reproducible, producing organs with the same size, shape, and function repeatedly from individual to individual. Yet, these reproducible organs are composed of highly variable cells. My laboratory focuses on stochasticity at the cellular scale and robustness at the organ scale.  We work on Arabidopsis flowers as a model system, particularly the four sepals (outermost green floral organs), which must be the same size to enclose and protect the developing bud. To understand organ size robustness mechanisms, we screened for mutants with variable sepal shape and size. We find that the variable organ size and shape1 (vos1) mutant disrupts the reproducibility of sepal shape by inhibiting spatiotemporal averaging of cellular growth variability.  We find that the variable organ size and shape2 (vos2) mutant disrupts the reproducibility of sepal sizes by causing variability in the timing of sepal primordium initiation.