Collection of promoters of Marchantia Transcription Factors

Marchantia has a small genome (280 Mb). Most of the major gene families present on more advanced plants are represented by a single or few orthologues in Marchantia, meaning that there is low genetic redundancy.

Throughout biology Transcription factors have been shown to elicit cell fate changes and establish cell lineages. Thus through characterising the upstream sequences of TF genes, we aim at finding gene regulatory sequences to express genes of interest in specific times and cellular types throughout development that can be used for different synthetic biology applications.

In the Cambridge lab we are screening gene regulatory sequences by generating a collection of proximal promoters (up to ~2kb) and 5UTR of TF. We are aiming at characterising them, and ultimately aim to make the collection available to the community to generate a community lead database of parts and expression patterns.

We published this project in The Plant Cell (Romani et al., 2024) and the images of the promoters are hosted at Mpexpatdb. We are happy to collaborate with researchers interested in using elements from the collection.