James Locke: Decoding noisy and dynamic gene regulation in plant development

Plants live in fluctuating environments, yet their development must remain both robust and adaptable. One way they achieve this balance is by regulating the inherent noise in gene expression, a key challenge for gene regulatory systems. In this talk, I’ll explore two contrasting strategies plants use to manage transcriptional variability, and what these reveal about the design principles of gene regulation in multicellular systems.

First, I’ll show how the Arabidopsis circadian clock can minimise noise through local cell–cell coupling. Using high-resolution luciferase imaging, single-cell microscopy, and spatial modelling, we find that intercellular interactions between clock cells help buffer molecular fluctuations and sustain coherent circadian rhythms across tissues.

Then, I’ll present evidence that plants can also harness gene expression noise to generate functional phenotypic diversity, even among genetically identical individuals. Single-cell and whole-plant analyses reveal that transcriptional variability is not always suppressed; instead, it may act as a mechanism for bet-hedging under stress.

Our work highlights how plants can regulate gene expression noise, suppressing it when precision is required and potentially amplifying it to facilitate bet-hedging in unpredictable environments.