Giovanni Sena Plant Root Regeneration as a Model System for Self-organization in Development ?
13h à 14h
Le séminaire de Giovanni Sena (Imperial College London) aura lieu dans l’Amphi Urbain (ESPCI, 10 Rue Vauquelin)
The establishment and maintenance of regular patterns of cell types within complex three-dimensional structures is the essence of development biology. Mechanisms of tissue organization are critical not only during embryogenesis, but also in post-embryonic developmental processes such as metamorphosis in animals, plasticity of neural networks, shoot and root branching in plants and organ regeneration in both animals and plants. A theoretical framework offering universal laws underlying all these processes would represent a major conceptual advancement in biology. In development biology regeneration is the process of re-growth of lost structures, and can be viewed as a powerful model to study tissue organization in multicellular systems. In this talk, I will describe the process of root regeneration in Arabidopsis thaliana using published data and discuss potential connections between the dynamics of tissue organization and proper self-organization. I will introduce a new multi-disciplinary project on this exact topic, which we are just starting in collaboration with the Center for Complexity Science, here at Imperial College London. I will also describe preliminary and unpublished data on the effects of external weak electric fields on root regeneration competence, and how we are planning to explore this phenomenon in connection to self-organisation.