Prof. Peter Ralph University of Technology Sydney Executive Director of the Climate Change Cluster (C3) in the Faculty of Science Recorded on 12 June 2018 Abstract of talk: Seagrass physiology has taken a dramatic shift in the last couple of years with the advent of omics tools to provide novel insights into the ecological function of these specialist plants. As the cost of generating a genome has dropped, we are now able to examine non-model organisms using the full suite of omics-based analysis to understand cellular processes. For this talk, the interactome describes the intersection of the molecular/cellular processes within the plant and with its external environment. Analysis of interactome processes allows divergent measures of cell activity and function to explain processes that we have previously just speculated about. This allows the measurement of both traditional physiological endpoints that probe cell processes along with any number of the newer omics measurements (genome, transcriptome, metabolome, proteome). Even deeper insight can be gained by having parallel measurements that corroborate or anchor assumptions about the interpretation of a proxy measure, such as chlorophyll fluorescence or gene regulation. Furthermore, the interactome will shed light on phenotypic plasticity within populations of plants and help us to understand why PCR-based monitoring can show elevated variability. Finally, a database containing dozens of seagrass transcriptome data sets will be highlighted, this is just waiting to be mined. Whilst comparisons with related plant genomes could provide new insights into taxonomic differences amongst the seagrasses.

WSC2018ISBW13Seagrassconservationphysiologyconferencesciencestressorsmonitoringgenetics