How do new regulatory connections arise during evolution? This is a central question in developmental biology. Transposable elements (TEs), which can proliferate across genomes, have the potential to disperse shared DNA motifs and introduce coordinated cis-regulatory sequences near multiple genes.
Funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship, the RegulatoryTEmbryo project will combine data mining approaches with in vivo experimental perturbations to identify the regulatory transposable elements controlling plant embryogenesis.
Led by Pierre Bourguet and hosted in the team of Pauline Jullien at IBMP, the project brings together complementary expertise in functional epigenomics and plant reproduction to address this question in Arabidopsis thaliana.
By defining how and when transposable elements rewire developmental gene networks, this research aims to reveal how these genomic elements can act as drivers of morphological innovation and evolutionary change.
The RegulatoryTEmbryo project is supported by the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme.
