MPIPZ welcomes Eva-Sophie Wallner as a new group leader
New group leader joins the Department of Comparative Development and Genetics
Eva-Sophie Wallner aims to discover the core mechanisms and minimal molecular networks that regulate the development of flat photosynthetic plant structures – a major evolutionary success that allowed land plants to effectively capture sunlight and CO2. Her model organism is the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha, which develops its first flat body structure – the (pro)thallus – de novo from a single-celled spore and in isolation from the parental plant. This bare growth enables tracking of all developmental stages from the spore to the mature flat photosynthetic thallus.
Eva-Sophie is using a combination of microscopy, genetic, protein biochemistry and computational cell segmentation approaches to decipher the mechanisms of cell division patterns and body axes formation during (pro)thallus morphogenesis. Her ultimate goal is to define a core set of essentail “flatness”-regulators and compare their level of conserveration vs. divergance between independently evolved flat photosynthetic structures, such as the thallus and the leaf.
About Eva-Sophie Wallner
Eva-Sophie is a developmental plant biologist, born in Vienna, who received her PhD from the University of Heidelberg in 2018. Her doctoral research, carried out at the COS in the lab of Prof. Thomas Greb, focused on the functional characterization of novel vascular regulators that allow differentiation of the sugar-transporting plant tissue phloem. Her dissertation and subsequent publications were awarded with the Ruprecht Karls and Host Wiehe prize.
After her PhD, she joined the group of Prof. Dominique Bergmann at the Stanford University as a postdoctoral researcher on a DFG fellowship, where she discovered a novel polarity domain that aids cell fate transitions during the formation of stomata – the epidermal valves of gas exchange in vascular leaves. After 10 years of vascular plant research with focus on Arabidopsis thaliana, Eva-Sophie completed a second postdoc with Prof. Liam Dolan at the GMI in Vienna, focussing on the early developmental stages of the non-vascular plant Marchantia polymorpha, which – together with her previous experience in leaf development – is forming the foundation of her future research.
A warm welcome to Eva-Sophie Wallner on joining us as a new group leader—we’re excited to see how her research will shape new ideas and directions in the field.
