We are a group of UConn graduate students, postdocs, and faculty members, who are interested in various aspects of plant biology, from molecular genetics to morphology and physiology, from bioinformatics/genomics to evolutionary ecology, from systematics to population genetics, you name it! We get together once a week for an informal, hourly meeting (i.e., “Plant Biology Group Seminar”) to learn each other’s research (through a 30-minute research presentation) and to learn some (random) cool stuff about plants (through a 20-minute “Plant of the Week” presentation).

Date	Research Presentation	“Plant of the Week” Presentation
01/22/2016	Organization meeting
01/29/2016	Guest lectures	Guest lectures
01/05/2016	SNOW DAY	SNOW DAY
02/12/2016	Lauren Stanley: Transcriptional regulation of carotenoid pigmentation during flower development	Yaowu Yuan: Monkey face, flying duck, naked man, and  deceptive pollination
02/19/2016	Yaowu Yuan: How leopards get their spots? Flowers will tell…	Pam Diggle: Good-bye, and keep cold
02/26/2016	Gerry Berkowitz: Calcium channels at the heart of signal transduction pathways in plant cells: from molecular structure to plant phenotypes	Lauren Stanley: Be wise, don’t self-fertilize
03/04/2016	Pam Diggle: Eco-devo and phenological oddities	Yaowu Yuan: How lettuce leaf gets the wrinkled, undulating edges – the genetic control of surface curvature
03/11/2016	Nora Mitchell: Using anchored phylogenomics to infer evolutionary relationships in the rapid radiation of Protea	Jill Wegrzyn: Fire adaptation in conifers: understanding serotinous cones
03/18/2016	Spring Break	Spring Break
03/25/2016	Rob Baker (visitor): Leaf Developmental Dynamics: modeling variation for quantitative genetics	Nora Mitchell: Exploding plants
04/01/2016	Baoqing Ding: Mutation in a houskeeping gene causes ecologically important floral trait alteration	Amy LaFountain: Molecular dimmer switches: The role of carotenoids in the photosynthetic apparatus
04/08/2016	R.C. Rizzitello: Evaluating the Impact of Pollination Methods and Competitive Ability on Gene Flow in a Novel Crop: Camelina sativa	Yi Ma: Touch me not
04/15/2016	Huanzhong Wang: Biofuels, biomass and plant vascular stem cells	Yaowu Yuan: How comes honeydew is green but cantaloupe is orange? Cauliflower has a say
04/22/2016	Wei Li: Increasing auxin in rootstock could improve graft success efficiency	Henry Frye: Blue Iridescence in Plants
04/29/2016	2016 Biology Undergraduate Research Symposium

Some exemplar subjects for the “Plant of the Week” presentations:

Deceptive orchids: how do flowers trick bees or wasps to copulate with them for pollination?

Solar tracking: how do sunflowers follow the sun?

Reaching the sky: why even the tallest tree in the world is shorter than 120 meters?

Parasitic plants: how do plants grow and evolve without photosynthesis?

Carnivorous plants: how and why do plants eat animals?

“Animal orchids”: why does a flower look like a monkey face or flying duck?

Big roles of small proteins: from anthocyanin pigmentation to stem cell maintenance, from flower symmetry to stomata patterning.

The skinny and the obese: plants with the smallest and the largest genomes.