ERC Advanced Grant awarded to Max Planck Director Miltos Tsiantis
Prof. Dr. Miltos Tsiantis, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research and head of the Department of Comparative Development and Genetics, receives an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). The prestigious funding will support his project CLONAL, aimed at advancing our understanding of clonal reproduction by root sucker formation.
About the ERC CLONAL project
ERC funding will enable Miltos to study clonal reproduction by root sucker formation, a striking phenomenon where somatic cells of the root spontaneously change their developmental path and give rise to hundreds of clonal offspring without fertilization. This trait is understudied owing to the scarcity of systems where genetics and advanced imaging can be employed for in-depth studies. CLONAL will address this problem by developing a new experimental system related to the model species Arabidopsis, and leverage differences in reproductive strategies between closely related species to elucidate the molecular genetic basis for root sucker development. The project will involve genetics, advanced imaging, single cell genomics and studies of natural variation.
"I am delighted to receive ERC Advanced Grant funding for our project CLONAL. This award will allow us to investigate the genetic basis for cell reprogramming leading to asexual reproduction. Insights from this project will help solve important open problems in developmental biology and may also be harnessed to benefit crop science."
Miltos Tisantis
About the ERC Advanced Grant
The ERC Advanced Grant is one of the most prestigious research funding schemes in Europe. It supports exceptional and established researchers who have demonstrated a sustained track record of significant scientific achievements. Awarded by the European Research Council, the grant funds ambitious and ground-breaking research projects that push the frontiers of knowledge.
About the European Research Coucil
Established by the European Union in 2007, the European Research Council (ERC) is Europe's leading funding body for outstanding frontier research. It supports innovative researchers of all nationalities and ages, to carry out innovative projects at institutions across Europe. The ERC offers four main grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants, and Synergy Grants. In addition, the Proof of Concept Grant scheme supports ERC grantees in exploring the innovation potential of their ideas or research results. The ERC is led by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council. Since 1 November 2021, Maria Leptin is the President of the ERC. The overall ERC budget from 2021 to 2027 is more than €16 billion, as part of the Horizon Europe programme, under the responsibility of the European Commissioner for Start-ups, Research and Innovation, Ekaterina Zaharieva.
About Miltos Tsiantis
Miltos Tsiantis is a biologist who studies plant development and diversity. He has shown how species-specific differences in developmental gene expression shape diverse leaf forms and how such genes influence the amount, duration, and direction of cellular growth to create distinct leaf geometries. For these projects, he established Cardamine hirsuta - a relative of the widely used model organism Arabidopsis - as a new experimental system for comparative research in plant biology.
Miltos studied biology in Athens before obtaining his DPhil from the University of Oxford. He conducted postdoctoral research at Oxford, holding a number of research fellowships including a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, and spent some of that time on research visits to Berkeley. He became a University Lecturer (2003) and Professor of Plant Developmental Genetics in Oxford (2010), and was a Tutorial Fellow at Wadham College. Since 2013, he is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne. His honours include Fellowship of the Royal Society of the UK, EMBO membership, EMBO Young Investigator, the Balfour Lecture of the Genetics Society, and the Society of Experimental Biology’s President’s Medal.