Application Deadline: June 30th 2010

Background
In spite of the predicted global changes in climate, very little is known of how physiological temperature changes influence molecular signalling events that control key plant growth traits. To address this knowledge deficit the Halliday and Grima labs are combining molecular, genetic and theoretical approaches to establish how temperature regulates signalling in the light activated pathways: major regulators of plant development, growth rate and photosynthetic rate.

Project aim
To apply modelling approaches to understand how temperature alters the molecular behaviour of the light receptor signal transduction in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana This project will use biological data, computational modelling and mathematical analysis, to understand the principles and molecular mechanisms that underlie temperature buffering or sensitivity in biological networks.

This is an opportunity to launch your career in interdisciplinary research: the biology of the future. We strongly encourage applicants with a background in any of the following areas: computational biology, bioinformatics, molecular biology, physics, mathematics or statistics.

For further information please contact:
vsparlin@ed.ac.uk and visit our websites: http://www.biology.ed.ac.uk/research/groups/khalliday/ http://csbe.bio.ed.ac.uk/grima.php

This project will be supported by the Centre for Systems Biology at Edinburgh (CSBE)
http://csbe.bio.ed.ac.uk/

Related Scientific Papers

  • Salazar et al., (2009) Prediction of photoperiodic regulators from quantitative gene circuit models. Cell, 139:1170-9.
  • Gould, et al., (2006) The molecular basis of temperature compensation in the Arabidopsis circadian clock. Plant Cell, 18(5):1177-87.
  • Locke et al., (2006) Experimental validation of a predicted feedback loop in the multi-oscillator clock of Arabidopsis thaliana. Mol. Syst. Biol., 2:59.
  • Heggie L and Halliday KJ. (2005) The highs and lows of plant life: temperature and light interactions in development. Int J Dev Biol., 49:675-87. Review.