Ottoline Leyser
Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory
- Phone: +44 (0)1223 761103
- Email: ol235 @ cam.ac.uk
Biography
Ottoline received her BA (1986) and PhD (1990) in Genetics from the University of Cambridge. After post-doctoral research at Indiana University and Cambridge, in she built an independent research programme at the University of York, where she worked from 1994-2010. Among her honours are the Society of Experimental Biology’s President’s Medal (2000), the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award (2007), the International Plant Growth Substance Association’s Silver Medal (2010). She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2009 New Year Honours list. 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. She is the President of International Plant Molecular Biology, a member of the Council of the Royal Society, and Deputy Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. She is Co-Editor in Chief of Current Opinions in Plant Biology and an Editor of Development. She is a Fellow of Clare College.
Research Interests
My 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. Our current data suggest that shoot apical meristems compete for common auxin transport paths to the root. High auxin in the main stem, exported from already active meristems, prevents the activation of further meristems by reducing the sink strength of the mains stem for auxin. Other hormonal signals can influence branching by modulating the auxin transport network and/or the ability of buds to compete for access to it. For example, strigolactones can reduce the accumulation of auxin transporters at the plasma membrane making it more difficult for buds to activate.
Selected recent publications
Prusinkiewicz P, Crawford C, Smith R, Ljung K, Bennett T, Ongaro V, Leyser O (2009) Control of bud activation by an auxin transport switch. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 106:17431-17436
Crawford S, Shinohara N, Sieberer T, Williamson L, George G, Hepworth J, Müller D, Domagalska MA, Leyser O (2010) Strigolactones enhance competition between shoot branches by dampening auxin transport. Development 137:2905-2913
Reviews
Leyser O (2011) Auxin, self-organisation, and the colonial nature of plants. Current Biology 21: R331-337
Domagalska DA, Leyser (2011) Signal integration in the control of plant development. Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 12:211-221
