Welcome! This site provides information about plant cell and molecular biology at Biological Sciences Department, Stanford University and the Department of Plant Biology, Carnegie Institution. Our focus is cellular, developmental, and molecular biology of plants. Our work employs bioinformatic, genetic, physiological, and biochemical methods to solve significant problems in basic plant biology. The challenge of posing the right questions and seeking comprehensive solutions is a partnership among students, postdoctoral scholars, staff, and the faculty. Innovation and bold experiments exploring the unknown are hallmarks of this plant biology program. We have close ties to the Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution and evolutionary biology group in the Biological Sciences Department at Stanford University that work with plants, and students, postdoctoral fellows, and visitors have the opportunity to participate in both molecular and ecological seminars and courses.

Plant biologists have an illustrious history here, as illustrated by two examples from the past.

• Nobel Prize winner George Beadle, a corn geneticist at Stanford, started a side project with colleague Ed Tatum to define what genes do in Neurospora using defined media. Their work, establishing "one gene, one enzyme," is the foundation of biochemical genetics.


• Carnegie staff Clausen, Keck and Heisey demonstrated that ecotypes have a genetic basis using transplantation gardens at many sites around California, including the Stanford campus.

Today we continue to focus on key, unsolved questions of fundamental importance to understanding plants. Answers often have broader implications for biology in general, such as the discovery in the Walbot lab that silenced transposons are methylated in maize, the discovery in the Long laboratory that plant flavones modulate transcription of bacterial genes in symbiotic Rhizobia, the discovery in the Somerville lab that the chemical diversity found in plant fatty acids has arisen by evolution of the catalytic mechanism of a single type of enzyme and the development of nanosensors for monitoring metabolite changes in single, living cells in real time by the Frommer group.

Learn more about our current work at the Faculty Page and about the graduate training program at Applying to the Graduate Program Page and Courses Page. Information for research opportunities for undergraduates is available at the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Page.

Consider joining us for the adventure.