Plant Science Leaders - Blake Meyers, UCD

Blake Meyers completed his BA degree at the University of Chicago and his MS and PhD degrees at the University of California, Davis. Previously, he was a Professor and Chair of the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences at the University of Delaware, principal investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and a professor of plant sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Blake was elected as a member of the U.S. Academy of Sciences in 2022 and has over 260 published research articles that have been cited over 40,000 times. Among his many leadership contributions, Meyers currently serves as Editor-in-Chief for The Plant Cell and has recently been named the new Director and Novozymes Chair in Genomics at the UC Davis Genome Center.

Meyers led the development and application of high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies to make fundamental discoveries about the biology of plants, including characterization of regulatory RNAs, namely small RNAs, the function and regulation of genomes, epigenetic mechanisms, and he has made insights into mechanisms of disease resistance.

His early work to develop publicly accessible database resources enabled fundamental and applied discoveries broadly across the plant sciences research community. His contributions have led to a better understanding of plant growth and development, including novel mechanisms controlling pollen formation and plant reproduction.

His research has potential applications to crop improvement, including development of new technologies for breeding hybrid crops.

Conviron sat down with Blake to discuss his new role at the UC Davis Genome Center.

What is your new role at UCD?

I’m the Director of the Genome Center at UC Davis. The center hosts about 17 resident faculty members and includes non-resident faculty working across our campus. It fosters interdisciplinary collaborations and connects scientists across many different fields—microbiology, human health, data science, plant biology (which is my own area), and more—to drive innovative research and address global challenges.

As Director, I oversee both the research and academic functions of the center, and provide strategic guidance for core facilities such as DNA sequencing, proteomics, metabolomics, and bioinformatics. I'm working closely with faculty members on these strategic initiatives, planning, and helping direct future initiatives that can raise the research profile of the university.

Will you be focused more on research, education or a combination?

We are a public university, so education is right up there as the top priority, alongside research. We have postdocs, grad students, and staff who are all learning. The Genome Center also runs or supports outreach programs that aim to explain to the public—kids, for example—what scientists do and build enthusiasm, interest, and appreciation for science in the community.

The Genome Center also offers courses in areas such as DNA sequencing, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and proteomics. These courses are open to researchers in industry or from any university—we advertise them pretty broadly. We’re bringing people in, training them, providing them with hands-on workshops, and hopefully enabling them to apply what they learn to their own research questions.

Then, of course, the faculty are teaching. All Genome Center faculty have home departments where they are engaged in instruction, and these home departments are all across campus.

What is it about UCD that attracted you?

There were a few things that attracted me to UC Davis. The role I’m in is quite unique. The Center’s previous director, Richard Michelmore, was the founding director. He had been in the job for 20 years, so it was really the first time the position opened up. Having been a faculty member and department chair over the last two decades, I was ready for a new challenge.

I also appreciate the diversity of research here. UC Davis is a huge research enterprise that spans fields from animal science and veterinary medicine, biomedical research, plant biology, microbiology, bioinformatics, engineering, and so on. That was an attraction for me.

And of course, the Northern California lifestyle is nice. We have dry, warm weather here and there are lots of beautiful places to visit on a day trip. And as a plant biologist and gardener – so many things grow so well in and around Davis.

What are your research objectives?

My position as director is very much “a lead by example” role—there’s an expectation that I’ll maintain an active research program in my own lab to showcase what people in the Genome Center can do and what it enables. I’m a plant biologist —and really an RNA biologist focused on small RNAs, which goes back more than 20 years to when we first developed methods for RNA sequencing.

Over the last ten years we’ve gotten particularly interested in reproductive biology, predominantly on the male side, in plants. So that’s anther development, which leads to pollen development. We’re interested in understanding how small RNAs are regulating gene expression during the critical stages of anther development—so, early stages and meiosis.

We and collaborators have developed techniques for analyzing these RNAs via sequencing and imaging. Also with collaborators, we've developed genetic resources—different mutants, for example, often by gene editing—and we do a lot of comparative analysis across different species. Right now, we’re working with maize, rice, wheat, and barley, for comparisons across grasses. We also have projects and interests in different eudicots, ranging from Aquilegia to tomato and strawberry.

Those comparative analyses are informative for understanding how these pathways evolved, what they're doing, and how they've diversified and distinguished themselves in different lineages. I like the breadth of work that we can do these days, particularly with all of the modern molecular tools that are available or applicable in these different species.

When I started in plant biology back in the 1990s, things like plant transformation and molecular analysis were slow and challenging – although at that time, they seemed amazing, just for being possible. In some ways, they’re still slow and challenging. But compared to where they were 30 years ago, we're just miles ahead and they're much, much quicker. There are many interesting experiments that we can tackle these days.

What do you find exciting about plant science?

We have a convergence today of cutting-edge technologies and a wealth of data that are available to us now, so we’re living in this data-rich environment, with genomes available at our fingertips.

We've got bioinformatics tools that allow us to go through those genomes to conduct the analysis rapidly. We can turn around and use different DNA sequencing or RNA sequencing approaches and then couple that with validation tools like gene editing or CRISPR, which has completely revolutionized how we do a lot of the validation work in plant biology.

We've got these incredibly accurate tools, and we can take that knowledge and develop plants with interesting new traits, understand the networks that regulate plant growth and development, and, with advances in plant transformation, introduce those traits to a wide variety of different crops, or even de novo domesticate crops from wild species. It’s an exciting time in plant biology.

What does the next era of cutting-edge genomics research look like from your perspective?

The next era will likely involve leveraging the wealth of genomic data and advanced bioinformatics tools, coupled with phenotyping and genetics, to accelerate our understanding of plant growth and development. With techniques like gene editing and the ability to introduce traits across a wide variety of crops, the possibilities for crop improvement and adaptation to global challenges like climate change are vast.

What is the needle you’re trying to move?

In my lab’s case, I would say it's fertility and productivity. By modulating these pathways that are important for anther and pollen development, we've found that we can turn on or turn off pollen production. This enables us to make male plants sterile, for example. Having male sterile plants may sound a little bit counterintuitive in the context of productivity, but male sterility allows you to force crosses between different varieties and that can then lead to a hybrid crop or hybrid seed. The plant that emerges from that hybrid seed tends to be more vigorous than either of the parental lines were. That vigor then leads to increased seed production in that offspring.

This finding of so-called “heterosis” goes back to almost 100 years ago when hybrid maize was first developed as a seed technology. And today, hybrid maize has come to dominate the industry because the hybrid yield is so much better than that of inbred varieties.

Maize is a well-trodden path for hybrid seed production, but there are other crops, like wheat or barley, for which there is not yet a good method for making hybrid seed. What we’re working on now is asking: Can we take the traits we've studied in maize that allow us to turn on and off male sterility, introduce them in wheat or barley, and make hybrid versions of those and boost yields by 10-15%?

This directly translates to addressing global challenges like the impact of climate change on agriculture and feeding a growing population.

How are priorities in plant science research changing?

I mean, climate change is a huge global issue that I think has become much more readily apparent to all of us in the past few years. When you look at the scale of the changes that are occurring in weather patterns, it’s clear that we really need to do something quickly. Plant biologists, like everyone everywhere, have families and care for ecosystem health, and we all want a healthy future for many generations.

Climate change is concerning to many people on a deeply personal level, and I think that as plant biologists, we have a role to play in adapting to and potentially also mitigating some of these changes.

How can fellow plant scientists increase student and society engagement in plant sciences?

It’s a great question. You know, generally, there has been a bit of anti-science rhetoric out there—you saw it on social media throughout the pandemic, and misinformation has become a real problem. Education and outreach is something that we should all be engaged in, as a way to counter misinformation.

We can get out of the lab, get off campus, meet kids going to the schools in the community, and raise their level of curiosity about science. It’s important because it's that curiosity that drives us as scientists.

We must ask how we can encourage lifelong curiosity and a love for learning. I think the more we can do that, the more we can build enthusiasm for science in general.

We also need to talk a lot about why plants are so important—how they provide food, fiber, and fuel for the world. They fix carbon. They're beautiful to look at. For all the things that they do, plants are often not as greatly appreciated as they should be. Promoting an appreciation for them as plant biologists is also ultimately beneficial to us as scientists.

What advice do you have for young plant scientists?

I would say that curiosity is key. You've got to be open to understanding and exploring different questions or areas of research. There are thousands of different areas to explore and ways to do experiments. If you want work in a leadership role, I think you have to be curious about people, how they work, and what motivates them. You can’t just singularly focus on what you’re personally passionate about.

It’s important to interact with people as well. Explore different opportunities for discovery, to contribute in different ways. Collaborations have been critical to my success over the years. Look around to see what other scientists are doing and why; go to their seminars. Consider if there are any connections between what they do and what you’re interested in. Think about whether there are potential opportunities to develop a project together, or just to learn more about their work. Many exciting breakthroughs come from collaborative projects.

And finally: Persistence is important. We all fail. Some of us fail a lot, but you have to pick yourself up and learn from your failures and appreciate that those are learning opportunities.

Research itself has a lot of setbacks. But sometimes from those challenges come new ways of thinking, new innovations, and unexpected progress. Pushing through those problems is often how we emerge as better scientists on the other side.