It is my great pleasure to announce a seminar to be given by Prof. Robert Martienssen from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, here at Lincoln University in the Field Research Centre on the 14th of March at 3.30pm
Rob is Howard Hughes Medical Institute–Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation investigator and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is also a professor and head of genomics and plant genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory ( his details can be found here: http://www.hhmi.org/scientists/robert-martienssen and here https://www.cshl.edu/research/faculty-staff/rob-martienssen/).
He is meeting with Chris Winefield and his team to discuss a joint project he and Chris have put together along that just been submitted to MBIE for consideration. If funded this will expand on an informal collaboration investigating the role of transposons in contributing to somatic mutations in grapevine.
He has graciously offered to give a seminar to be held:
Date: Wednesday 14 March
Time: 3.30 pm
Venue: FSC lecture theatre
The title of his seminar will be: “How to avoid Bad Karma: germline reprogramming and epigenetic inheritance with small RNA."
In his seminar he will describe work carried out in collaboration with the Malaysian Palm Oil Board which was published recently in Nature (Ong-Abdullah, M. et al. Loss of Karma transposon methylation underlies the mantled somaclonal variant of oil palm. Nature 525, 533–537 (2015).
Please come along to hear one from one the world’s leading plant geneticists presenting work from the cutting edge of epigenetics and feel free to share the details of the event.