Michigan State University is fortunate to have passionate educators who are committed to enhancing the experience of their students and who help to provide the best education possible.The Graduate Sch...

The postdoctoral researcher will work in Dr. Michael Grillo’s plant evolutionary genetics lab. The goal of this research project is to understand the genomic basis of plant-microbiome variation in leg...

A key insight from human genetics is that, as a species, we are all very genetically similar to one another and share much of our genetic variation. Our genome can be depicted as a string of letters (...

Understanding evolutionary repeatability is a central question in biology, as it informs how predictably organisms respond to similar selection pressures. However, the extent to which phenotypic repea...

Working/Functional Title Assistant/Associate/Full Professor Tenure System Position Summary The Plant Resilience Institute (PRI) at Michigan State University invites applications for multiple tenure-st...

Plant cells are totipotent, meaning individual cells have the potential to develop into a full organism, a property unique to the zygote for animals. However, in most species for most cells, plant cells are not spontaneously totipotent, since they must be treated with specific hormone combinations to unlock their totipotency. Species within the Kalanchoe genus is unique as they spontaneously develop foliar embryos that are fully realized plantlets with shoot and root from notches along the edges of leaves. We speculate that the progenitor cells that give rise to these foliar embryos are totipotent, and we are using single cell techniques to identify & characterize them. In addition to being a fundamental process for plant biology, we foresee unlocking totipotency has many biotechnological applications, such as faciliating genetic transformation and the development of synthetic organs of biomanufacturing.