Ross Sozzani

Bio

Our growing society faces new and dynamic challenges such as global climate change, the scarcity of arable land and the need for sustainable energy. Maximizing the utility of plants in each of these areas is key to meeting these challenges. Overall growth rate and biomass is largely regulated by the temporal and spatial control of stem cell self-renewal and differentiation of their progeny. When a stem cell divides it produces a copy of itself, and it produces a daughter cell that can develop into different types of cells. The means and mechanisms by which this occurs are poorly understood.

The Sozzani Lab research focuses on understanding how stem cells are organized and maintained in the root of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Our goal is to gain a coherent qualitative and quantitative understanding of stem cell maintenance at the systems-level. Our research leverages techniques derived from molecular, developmental and cell biology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science and engineering. In plant systems, stem cell regulation has clear implications for increasing the production of crops used for food, fiber and fuel. Our research will reveal a specific molecular pathway of plant stem cells, and provide broader insights into the fundamental properties of stem cells across the plant and animal kingdoms.

Faculty Cluster Hire for Synthetic and Systems Biology

Area(s) of Expertise

Plant stem cells, Plant development, Computational Biology, Predictive Modeling

Publications

• Cell-material interactions in 3D bioprinted plant cells , (2024)
• The Black American experience: Answering the global challenge of broadening participation in STEM/agriculture , PLANT CELL (2024)
• Functional annotation of proteins for signaling network inference in non-model species , Nature Communications (2023)
• Obituary Philip N. Benfey (1953-2023) , DEVELOPMENTAL CELL (2023)
• Phosphate starvation: response mechanisms and solutions , JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BOTANY (2023)
• Prediction and functional characterization of transcriptional activation domains , (2023)
• Quantitative Modeling of the Short-Term Response to Nitrogen Availability that Coordinates Early Events in Lateral Root Initiation , (2023)
• The ALOG family members OsG1L1 and OsG1L2 regulate inflorescence branching in rice , PLANT JOURNAL (2023)
• Field-grown soybean shows genotypic variation in physiological and seed composition responses to heat stress during seed development , Environmental and Experimental Botany (2022)
• Gene regulatory networks for compatible versus incompatible grafts identify a role for SlWOX4 during junction formation , PLANT CELL (2022)