The Dawe LabThe Dawe Lab

  • Our Group

    The Dawe Lab is currently comprised of one Senior Research Associates (Jonathan), four graduate students (Meghan, Rebecca, Yibing, and Mingyu), and one research staff member (Dong won). Click above to learn more about our individual research interests.

  • Genetics

    Corn is widely used to study and illustrate mendelian traits.  In corn, purple kernels are dominant over yellow kernels, and full kernels are dominant over shrunken kernels. These kernels came from an ear segregating for shrunken2 and a2-m1 (yellow). The yellow kernels have spots caused by excision of the transposable element Spm.

  • Maize (Zea mays L.)

    A diploid organism with 10 large chromosome pairs, corn is easily studied with the microscope. Its genetic features, including many known and mapped phenotypic mutants and remarkable genetic diversity.  Here, Na is standing with Zea luxurians, a close relative of maize that freely intercrosses with the domesticated forms.

  • Mitosis

    Immunofluorescence images from barley root tips (Han Zhang). Plant kinetochores appear to initiate their own kinetochore fibers early in prometaphase, either by directly nucleating microtubules or promoting microtubule growth in their vicinity. Chromosomes are shown in blue, spindles (tubulin) in red and kinetochore (CENH3) in green.

  • Meiotic Drive

    Meotic drive describes a variety of phenomena that “beat Mendel’s rules” and cause the preferential segregation of alleles or haplotypes to the next generation. These ears are testcrosses showing how abnormal chromosome 10 (linked to yellow kernel color) is transmitted to progeny at higher frequencies than expected ratio of 1 :1.

About Kelly

Our Research

In the Field

In the Lab