Sebastián Martínez Salazar, a graduate student at the Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia. finished a research exchange at the Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain during the months of April, May and June 2022.
During this secondment he has been trained in RNA in situ hybridization at the Cristina Ferrándiz lab. He studied the expression patterns of three canonical transcription factors of the fruit gene regulatory network in Galium hypocarpium. G. hypocarpium belongs to the coffee family (Rubiaceae) and develops fruits derived from inferior ovaries. He studied the expression of GahyFUL, GahyAG and GahyHEC3 in developing ovaries to hypothesise their contribution to fruit development and epicarp-pericarp tissue delimitation. For instance, he found that GahyAG is expressed in stigmas and the inner region of the ovary, but not in the epicarp. These results, together with previous expression data in other Rubiaceae (Morinda citrifolia) will contribute to understanding the diverse mechanisms by which carpels transition to fruits, explaining the diversity we find in different groups of angiosperms.
