Kirsten Bomblies
Assistant Professor of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology
Phone: 617-496-0941
E-mail:
Office: HUH 224, 22 Divinity Avenue
Lab Website: http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/bomblies/
Plants face a tough challenge: they are rooted to the spot where they land as seeds and to survive they must respond appropriately to the vagaries of their environment; and all this within the constraints of a sessile lifestyle! How do they do this? What genetic mechanisms control plant adaptation to their biotic and abiotic environments? To understand this, we use two closely related species as models: Arabidopsis thaliana (the fruit fly of the plant world) and its close relative, Arabidopsis arenosa (which, unlike A. thaliana, is an obligate outcrosser and has numerous other interesting traits not found in A. thaliana).
One focus is on Arabidopsis arenosa populations that inhabit either railways or shaded outcrops. The railway populations face a series of environmental challenges (such as late summer drought and herbicide applications) that seem to have selected for a rapid-cycling "weedy" lifestyle. These plants have become rapid flowering annuals, and have lost a need to be vernalized (cold treated). We are studying the molecular mechanisms underlying this habitat-associated shift in life habit using genomic, genetic and molecular techniques.
In addition to their ability to adapt to environmental change, plants are also amazing in their ability to tolerate genome duplications. The species we primarily work on, Arabidopsis arenosa, is an autotetraploid, meaning it has doubled its genome. We are interested in understanding how plants can adapt critical processes of meiosis to this doubled genome state. How does an optimized diploid meiosis machinery deal with suddenly having four chromosomes? What has to happen at the molecular level to adapt this machinery to segregating four instead of two homologs?
We have two major foci, unified by the theme of adaptation:
Current group members
Brian Arnold – PhD student . Population genetics and genomics of adaptation in A. arenosa.
April Dobbs – PhD student . Genetics of adaptation in A. arenosa.
Jesse Hollister – Postdoc. Population genetics and genomics of adaptation in A. arenosa.
Ben Hunter – Postdoc. Molecular genetics of hybrid necrosis and temperature responses in A. thaliana. Flowering time and meiosis in A. arenosa.
Kevin Wright - Postdoc. (Co-advised by John Willis). Adaptation in Mimulus and meiosis in A. arenosa.
Related publications
Hunter, B. and Bomblies, K. The genetics of divergence and speciation in the Arabidopsis genus. The Arabidopsis Book 2010.
Bomblies, K. (2009) Too much of a good thing? Hybrid necrosis as a by-product of plant immune system diversification. Invited Review. Botany. 87, pp. 1013-1022.
Related publications from my postdoc
Bomblies, K. and Weigel, D. (2007) Arabidopsis- a model genus for speciation. Current Opinion in Genetics and Development 17, pp. 500-504.
Bomblies, K.*, Lempe, J.*, Epple, P., Warthmann, N., Lanz, C., Dangl, J. L. and Weigel, D. (2007) Autoimmune response as a mechanism for a Dobzhansky-Muller type incompatibility syndrome in plants. PLoS Biology 5, pp. 1962-1972. *Indicates equal contribution by these authors
Bomblies, K., and Weigel, D. (2007) Hybrid necrosis: Autoimmunity as a potential gene flow barrier for plant species. Nature Reviews Genetics 8, pp. 382-389.
