19 December 2023 – When Chin-Min Kimmy Ho was in junior high school, her teacher posed a puzzling question to her class: why do Juniper trees growing on Taiwan’s highest mountains have smaller leaves than the trees growing directly outside the classroom? “Learning that the answer lay in how the high-altitude trees had adapted to their harsh environment sparked a great interest in plant biology in me,” says Ho, an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology, Academia Sinica in Taipei. “I wanted to understand more about what influences a plant’s shape.”
Ho realised that to do this, it was important to know what was happening at the level of a plant’s cells: ever since she has been fascinated with how cells divide, organise, and choose their paths in developing leaf tissues. “My work focuses on how differences at the cellular level influences leaf epidermal development,” she says. “The epidermis is the plant’s first line of defence to protect it from its environment. We look at microscopic structures such as stoma and cuticles in the epidermis that play crucial roles in respiration and water loss. We want to better understand how these intricate parts of the leaf epidermis are formed and translate this research into non-model plants.”
Ho says that becoming an EMBO Global Investigator will help her personally adapt to some of the challenges of being an early-stage group leader. “Joining the EMBO Global Investigator Network presents exciting opportunities to take our work in new directions by connecting with like-minded and multidisciplinary specialists in Asia and in Europe,” she says. “Climate change presents huge challenges to life around the world, and I hope our work will, for example, contribute to the growth of crop varieties that are better adapted to drought conditions.”
