Winter Talk: The Curious Case of Mistletoe, with Dr Pallavi Singh
Dr Pallavi Singh is an incoming Reader at the University of York's Centre for Novel Agricultural Products.
The Curious Case of Mistletoe: What can a plant parasite teach us about plant communications?
Mistletoe is one of nature’s botanical oddities. It germinates on another plant, grows into its tissues and establishes an intimate connection with its host’s vascular system. But how does it do this, and what does it take for one plant to become physically and biologically connected to another? In this talk, I will take you inside the hidden world of mistletoe and explore how this extraordinary plant establishes its relationship with its host. I will describe our efforts to grow European mistletoe (Viscum album) under controlled conditions, allowing us to observe the earliest stages of its development without a host and investigate how an apparently independent seedling transforms into a highly specialised parasite. I will explore the genes and developmental processes that enable mistletoe to produce its remarkable holdfast and haustorium, the structures that anchor it to its host and ultimately establish a connection with its vascular system. But European mistletoe has another surprise: it has the largest native genome of any species in Britain and Ireland, measured at around 95 gigabase pairs. What can this extraordinary genome, and its unusual relationship with trees, tell us about how plants recognise, interact with and communicate with one another? Could understanding how mistletoe naturally connects to other plants inspire entirely new ways of thinking about plant–plant communication? Join me to discover the biology behind one of our most familiar, yet least understood, plants.
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