MBL Friday Evening Lecture Series: “Attack of the Killer Plants!” Neelima Sinha, University of California Davis

Whether you’re in Woods Hole or halfway around the world, join us for this venerable MBL lecture series.

Lectures are free and open to the public for in-person and virtual attendance. No registration required for in-person attendance. Doors open at 7:30 PM, lectures start at 8 PM in the Cornelia Clapp Auditorium.

The lifestyle strategy for most plants is an autotrophic one—they generate their food by photosynthesis using atmospheric CO2 and sunlight. Other essential nutrients are obtained by absorption from the soil. But this is not a universal strategy, and a subset of plants have either partially or totally given up photosynthesis and rely on animals or other plants for carbon and other nutrients. These plants make structures that trap insects or small mammals or penetrate other plant parts to obtain their nutrition. The trapping structures, made by the first subset of plants, called carnivorous plants, are often leaf-derived. While the second subset, called parasitic plants, use unique organs called haustoria to penetrate host tissues to acquire nutrients. Both carnivorous and parasitic plants are ecologically interesting, and no doubt play important roles in their unique ecological niches. However, many parasitic plants have become major global agricultural threats leading to huge crop losses worldwide. They actively identify and parasitize their host plants and have sparked a flurry of research into the parasitism mechanisms they use so control strategies can be devised.

Neelima Sinha is a Distinguished Professor in Plant Biology. During her MS in Botany at Lucknow University in India she focused on understanding the breadth of form in plants. During her doctoral studies in Botany at the University of California, Berkeley she received multifaceted training in genetics and developmental biology. Her lab is interested in analyzing plant development from the molecular, genetic, and evolutionary perspective, using model organisms like maize, tomato, and Arabidopsis, as well as many non-model organisms. Her collaborative research has helped expand knowledge of the evolution of developmental mechanisms in plants, and more recently move these phylogenetically anchored studies to understanding the evolution of plant drought and submergence stress responses. Recent work on plant-parasite interactions has resulted in elucidation of molecular mechanisms of parasitism and is helping establish intervention strategies in a crucial area of plant biology. A thorough understanding of plant growth and development phenomena will be crucial to being able to harness modern genetic tools for crop improvement, and for producing better feed and fuel crops. She is a fellow of the AAAS and the American Society of Plant Biologists and was the recipient of the Pelton Award from the Botanical Society of America.