I studied Biology at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), specializing in plant biotechnology. For my MsC thesis, I studied the effect of delayed flowering in alfalfa (Medicago sativa) at the laboratory of Molecular Plant Biology at Fundacion Instituto Leloir
In 2021, I moved to Barcelona to start my PhD at CRAG. Under the supervision of Salome Prat and Igancio Rubio Somoza, I am studying the developmental biology of potato tubers and micro-RNA pathways involved in it.
Monday session 5
Cracking the vascular origin of potato tuber formation through a single cell RNA-Seq approach.
P. GARCIA GAGLIARDI , S. PRAT MONGUÍO
Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG), 08193, Cerdanyola, Barcelona, Spain.
Potatoes represent the most important non-cereal source of calories for human consumption reaching a production of 376 million metric tons in 2021. Even though many of the tuber inducing pathways have been identified, the process by which stolons, a specialized underground stem, swells to become the tuber remains unknown. To understand the cellular processes behind this we first performed transverse sections of potato stolons in different stages of tuberization and looked for patterns of cellular proliferation. To identify the gene regulatory network behind this, we performed single cell RNA-seq of induced and un-induced in vitro tubers. This was the first time something like this was attempted in a storage organ. We validated the identity of our cluster analysis through in-situ assays of in-vitro and stolon derived tubers. Our results show a new kind of cellular identity, enriched in tuber identity and starch accumulation genes.