Reprogramming the plant cell: Where can we go from here?

Plant tissue culture — regenerating whole plants from isolated cells — underlies some of the most consequential tools in modern agriculture, from transgenic crop improvement to clonal propagation of elite varieties. Like regenerative medicine in animals, it is fundamentally a cell reprogramming problem: how do you induce a cell to abandon its current identity and adopt a new one? In animals, transcription factors (TFs) have proven to be master regulators of this process, driving transformations from fibroblasts to neurons, somatic cells to pluripotent stem cells. Plants offer analogous opportunities, but the space of possible TF-induced transformations remains largely unexplored. This talk will describe our lab's systematic approach to mapping that space — using a high-throughput platform that expresses individual TFs in maize protoplasts and reads out the full transcriptome-wide response by RNA-sequencing. We will present results from screening 656 TFs to date and discuss how these data are used to prioritize candidates for functional validation, with the long-term goal of inducing new cell fate transformations in culture, including meiosis and pollen formation from somatic cells — a change that would dramatically compress plant breeding cycles.

Bio

Brad Nelms is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Georgia. His laboratory uses genomic and cell-based approaches to study plant development and genetics. Before joining UGA in 2020, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University and received his PhD from Harvard University, where he developed high-throughput cell-based screening assays — approaches he has since adapted for plant systems.