Assistant Professor, Natural Sciences and Science Education, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University Singapore

Biograph
Dr. Chen received B. Med. Sc. from Peking University in 2003 and PhD from National University of Singapore in 2010. He studied the formation of male gametophytes in flowering plants at Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory during his Ph.D. After that he received EMBO long-term fellowship (ALTF 798-2009) to conduct postdoctoral research on regulatory mechanism and modeling of stem cell niche at Utrecht University, the Netherlands from 2010-2012. He came back to Singapore in 2012 and joined Department of Biological Sciences / Centre for BioImaging Sciences, National University of Singapore, working on developmental and regenerative biology. Currently Dr. Chen is an Assistant Professor at NSSE, NIE/NTU, and a Principal Investigator of Molecular Genetics Lab. He was appointed President of The Singapore Institute of Biology and he is serving as co-leader of Singapore team in International Biology Olympiad.

Speech Title: Identification of plant genes involved in the interaction with soil microbiome

Abstract: Plants are sessile organisms and are unable to escape biotic and abiotic stresses. It is therefore important to identify genes that are involved in response to biotic factors such as soil microbiome for deeper understanding of the transcriptome profiling. In this study, Arabidopsis thaliana Col-0 (A.thaliana) seeds were grown on 3 different conditions (MS agar, autoclaved soil and non-autoclaved soil), root RNA was extracted and transcriptome profiling performed using GeneChip® microarray for the quick and effective identification of large number of differentially expressed genes. A.thaliana grown on all three conditions did not showed impaired plant development visually and the transcriptome profiling of genes directly related to biotic stresses showed that majority of pathogen-related (PR) proteins which were up-regulated in the soil growth conditions as compared to MS Agar. 55% of the differentially expressed secondary metabolites belongs to the flavonoids family and were mainly down-regulated in the soil conditions as compared to MS Agar. Only one secondary metabolite, TT4, were expressed throughout all three conditions and had the highest expression signal in MS agar. Secondary metabolites not only provide protections to plants when there are biotic and abiotic stresses, they also have various health and nutritional values and thus the identifications of them in this study could be used as a guide for providing the supplements for agriculture using non-soil conditions.