Sannidhi Mennon, an RA in the Mortimer lab, won a prize for most effective flash talk at the recent EGDB divisional annual meeting. Sannidhi described work she’s doing as part of the m-CAFEs SFA.
Brachypodium distachyon is a model grass closely related to essential food and fuel crops such as wheat, sorghum and switchgrass. Transgenic B.distachyon is a valuable tool for studying the genetics of these important crops. Current methods of transforming B. distachyon are slow and require painstaking dissection of immature embryos. She described the method we’ve developed, which makes use of the intercalary meristem as the starting material. As she explained, this meristem is the reason you can mow your lawn and it grows back!
