Dominique Bergmann

Our lab is interested in how stem cell-like populations are created and maintained in developing, environmental responsive tissues.  We primarily use the Arabidopsis stomatal lineage for these studies because this epidermal cell lineage distills features common to all tissue development: stomatal precursor cells are chosen from an initially equivalent field, they undergo asymmetric and self-renewing divisions, they communicate among themselves to establish pattern and they terminally differentiate into stable, physiologically important cell-types.  In the past decade, we have developed the stomatal lineage into a conceptual and technical framework for the study of cell fate, stem-cell self-renewal and cell polarity. Currently, we are especially interested in: (1) using single-cell technologies to capture transcriptomic and chromatin state information about cells as they transit through various identities (stem cell-like, committed, differentiated, and reprogrammed); (2) using new ‘in vivo biochemical’ approaches to identify transcription factor modules in the nuclear and cell polarity complexes at the plasma membrane, and to determine how these complexes guide changes in cell shape, size and fate; (3) computational modeling of pattern formation in the epidermis, and (4) testing how environmental information impacts developmental choices and robustness.