A plant’s roots serve as a major line of defense against environmental stress to protect the plant as a whole. Roots of diverse plant species have found ways to deal with stress by devising responses, often within individual cell types, to resist drought, mineral deficiencies, pathogens and other insults that impair plant growth. I will present my lab’s research that uses systems, and developmental biology approaches to interrogate the transcriptional networks that function in response to many of these environmental stresses in tomato and sorghum.

Melinda Denton Endowed Lecture:
This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Melinda Denton, and the endowment supporting this lecture was established through the generous gifts made by Melinda’s family, friends, and colleagues. Melinda was Professor and Chair of Botany and Curator of the University of Washington Herbarium. She served the Botany Department and the UW in many ways, most notably as Chair of Botany from 1987 until cancer forced her to resign in January 1994. Besides becoming one of the UW's top botanical researchers and administrators, Melinda also became a national authority on systematics, the process of understanding how plants relate to and evolve from each other.