UPSC Cutting-Edge Seminar

Sascha Laubinger
Institute of Biology, Department of Genetics, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), Germany

Title: Molecular and phenotypic footprints of climate in native Arabidopsis thaliana

Abstract:  Climate change is reshaping plant development, yet how gene function operates under natural environmental variability remains poorly understood. In this talk, I will present a field-based approach that links climate, phenotype, and gene regulation in native populations of Arabidopsis thaliana. By combining large-scale in situ phenotyping with transcriptome profiling across multiple years and environments, we show that temperature variation predictably shapes plant morphology and leaves a clear molecular signature. Using paired per-plant data and machine learning, we recover known regulators of temperature responses and identify new candidate genes associated with climate-relevant traits. These results demonstrate that natural environmental variation can be used as a powerful framework to study gene function, providing a bridge between laboratory biology and real-world ecological complexity.

Host: Stephan Wenkel