Welcome to the Ashraf Lab
- Why do we study plants at cellular level?
- Because life is cellular!
We are currently at the Biology department, Howard University; and moving to the Botany department, University of British Columbia (starting January, 2025). We ask fundamental biology questions and use plants (model plant Arabidopsis and crop plant Maize) as our model systems to answer these questions. The simple things we observe in our day to day life, such as plants are growing, plants are bending towards light, plants are sensing gravitational force, plants are sensing water -- these instructions are coordinated at a cellular level. For instance, a plant organ grows because of either cell division or cell elongation or both. A plant can bend towards or away from universal stimuli (light, gravity, water) because certain cell types act differently.
As we understand the biology of plant growth and development better at cellular level, it enhances our knowledge about how plants respond to environmental challenges and in a bigger picture, how a cell responds to variable growth conditions across the species.
We do not have to be a scientist or work in a research lab to observe a plant growth and response at organismal level. To observe cellular activities, we need to rely on molecular and cell biology tools. In the following section, a quick overview of one of the fundamental cellular events, cell division, is demonstrated using different plant cell types.
- Because life is cellular!
We are currently at the Biology department, Howard University; and moving to the Botany department, University of British Columbia (starting January, 2025). We ask fundamental biology questions and use plants (model plant Arabidopsis and crop plant Maize) as our model systems to answer these questions. The simple things we observe in our day to day life, such as plants are growing, plants are bending towards light, plants are sensing gravitational force, plants are sensing water -- these instructions are coordinated at a cellular level. For instance, a plant organ grows because of either cell division or cell elongation or both. A plant can bend towards or away from universal stimuli (light, gravity, water) because certain cell types act differently.
As we understand the biology of plant growth and development better at cellular level, it enhances our knowledge about how plants respond to environmental challenges and in a bigger picture, how a cell responds to variable growth conditions across the species.
We do not have to be a scientist or work in a research lab to observe a plant growth and response at organismal level. To observe cellular activities, we need to rely on molecular and cell biology tools. In the following section, a quick overview of one of the fundamental cellular events, cell division, is demonstrated using different plant cell types.
A cultured tobacco cell line, Bright Yellow 2 (BY2), is going through cell division. The green signal in the movie indicates the microtubule. These cells are dividing equally here, known as symmetric cell division. The final product is two daughter cells with same cellular identity like the mother cell. The cell line, GFP-TUBULIN/GT16, is generously shared by Dr. Tobias Baskin and Dr. Arpita Yadav.
This movie also demonstrates cell division, but in a different plant (Maize) and in a different cell type (Subsidiary mother cell). Interestingly, the end product is two unequal-sized daughter cells and these two daughter cells or cell types (subsidiary cell and pavement cell) have different function. When a cell division results into two different cell types, it is known as asymmetric cell division. Here, the magenta color indicates a polarly localized protein (PANGLOSS1) providing direction to cell and green color indicates microtubule.
This movie also highlights the asymmetric cell division in the same plant (Maize) and same cell type (Subsidiary mother cell). The only difference is the visualization of nucleus (magenta color) using HISTONE-YFP. And, similar to previous movies, the green color indicates microtubule.
In this Cell Polarity special issue webinar, Arif Ashraf is talking about the recent discovery how the nucleus decides the future cell division site.