Madelaine Bartlett

Research Area

Plants have evolved diverse morphological solutions to diverse ecological problems: cacti thrive in deserts, tiny duckweeds float on water, and carnivorous plants steal their nitrogen from prey lured into traps. Despite immense morphological diversity, all plants are constructed from the same component parts, using deeply conserved genes. Understanding how evolution remixed, remodeled, and recast conserved components to generate diversity enables future innovation in synthetic biology, crop engineering, and biomimetics. To get there, we must first understand how complex morphological traits arise and change over deep time.

My lab works to identify the genes that regulate the development of complex traits, define how these genes function in development, and determine how evolutionary change in these genes directs morphological diversification. To address these questions, we leverage the morphological diversity of the grasses. The grass family includes many crops, has diversified to occupy almost every terrestrial niche, and dominates ecosystems. Importantly, there are toolkits available for multiple grass species, including crop species, that allow us to dissect the molecular underpinnings of grass diversity, to reconstruct molecular and morphological evolution of key genes and traits, and to use our discoveries for crop improvement.

Project Interests

I am particularly interested in developing projects focused on either the evolution and development of floral sexuality, or the evolution and development of organ elaborations called awns. Both floral sexuality and awns are diverse in the grasses, and both traits impact plant fitness and crop productivity. I would like to explore the genetic, anatomical, and morphological underpinnings of their development and evolution, their ecological correlates, and their functions in grass biology.