MBS Seminar - What happens when a genome wakes up: gene regulation during seed germination

Title: What happens when a genome wakes up:  gene regulation during seed germination

Speaker: Prof Mathew G Lewsey of La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food, and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space

Bio: Prof Mathew G Lewsey studies how plants perceive and interact with the world around them through regulation of their genes. His lab at the La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food is home to a diverse team of engineers, computational biologists, genome scientists and more. Their work spans from the fundamental to the applied, involving commercial partners who grow a range of crops such as cannabis, opium poppies, barley, oats and peas.

Prof Lewsey completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge with Prof John Carr, studying how plant viruses manipulate host plant biology to favour infection and transmission. He continued his training as a Marie Curie Fellow at Salk Institute (La Jolla, CA, USA) with Prof Joe Ecker and at the Centro Nacional de Biotecnologica (Madrid, Spain) with Prof Roberto Solano. His projects at that time focused on applying functional genomics to understand plant hormone biology and small RNA singalling between organs. Prof Lewsey joined La Trobe University in April 2016 to further his interests in genomics and systems biology. In 2017 he became Director of the La Trobe Genomics Platform, in 2019 Deputy Director of the ARC Industrial Transformation Research Hub for Medicinal Agriculture, and from 2020-2022 he was the Director for Research and Industry Engagement for the School of Life Sciences. Most recently he has helped establish the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space, which studies plant design and bioresource production to enable off-Earth habitation and provide solutions for improving on-Earth sustainability. He now serves as the La Trobe University Plants for Space Node Leader.