Associate ProfessorMarcus Heisler

Marcus's research interest is in developmental patterning, i.e. the ability of individual cells to coordinate to create tissues and organs of different shapes and structures. Plants, with their complex symmetrical arrangemnts of leaves and floral organs and amazing variety of leaf shapes are a rich source of patterning puzzles. Plants also evolved multicellularity independently of animals enabling us to compare and contrast the stategies that have evolved to solve a common problem.

Specifically, his lab works on how plant organs such as leaves or floral organs are positioned and how they are shaped. Both these processes involve the coordination of cell polarity and gene expression and understanding how this occurs is their main interest. Although they utilize a variety of molecular biology methods, they emphasize high resolution imaging to gain a detailed, dynamic view of cellular and tissue level processes. They then combine this approach with fine-scale perturbation techniques that allow us to disrupt gene activity with single cell speceficity. Their current focus is on understanding and re-engineering the floral ground plan (RESYDE).

For more details see the web page at www.heislerlab.com, follow us on Twitter @heisler_lab and checkout the RESYDE project: https://www2.hu-berlin.de/resyde/.

Marcus's research aligns with the Faculty of Science Research Strengths - Understanding Life on Earth, Complex Systems.