Gonville & Caius College Fellow Professor Ian Henderson has been awarded an European Research Council Advanced Grant, a prestigious and competitive prize that will support his research to advance understanding of plant genome structure and function.

Ian, Head of the ‘Genetic and Epigenetic Inheritance in Plants’ Group in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, will use the significant support to investigate centromeres, as he explains.

“The proposal seeks to investigate enigmatic regions of the genome called the centromeres,” Ian says. 

“These regions play a deeply conserved role in cell division and mediate chromosome segregation, yet are paradoxically fast evolving. To address this problem, we will use the model plant Arabidopsis to study the genetic and epigenetic structure of the centromeres, and understand why they evolve so rapidly.

“I am highly honoured and excited to be awarded an ERC Advanced grant. The advent of long-read sequencing technology makes addressing these questions timely. The long-term support of the ERC will allow us to capitalise on these advances, build new collaborations, and train postdoctoral researchers to study and understand the centromeres.”

Caius Fellows Professor Ivan Smith and Professor Richard Nickl in Mathematics, and Professor Sujit Sivasundaram, in History, were recipients of ERC Advanced Grants in the last two years.

Patterns of sequence similarity within an Arabidopsis centromere. A heat map is shown where a single Arabidopsis centromere has been compared to itself. The red and orange colours indicate very high levels of self-similarity, whereas green and blue represent lower levels of similarity. The coloured patterns indicate complex patterns of sequence repetition within the centromere. Research in Prof. Henderson's ERC Advanced program will investigate how these patterns arise during evolution, and why the centromeres change so rapidly.