David W Galbraith

David W Galbraith

Professor, Plant Science
Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Professor, BIO5 Institute
Primary Department
Department Affiliations
Contact
(520) 621-9153

Work Summary

I examine the molecular functions of the different cells found in the tissues and organs of plants and animals and how they combine these functions to optimize the health and vigor of the organism.

Research Interest

David Galbraith obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, and postdoctoral training as a NATO Fellow at Stanford University. His first academic appointment was at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, and he became Professor of Plant Sciences at the University of Arizona in 1989. His research has focused on the development of instrumentation and methods for the analysis of biological cells, organs, and systems. He is internationally recognized as a pioneer in the development and use of flow cytometry and sorting in plants, developing widely-used methods for the analysis of genome size and cell cycle status, and for the production of somatic hybrids. He also was among the first to develop methods for the analysis of gene expression within specific cell types, using markers based on Fluorescent Protein expression for flow sorting these cells, and microarray platforms for analysis of their transcriptional activities and protein complements. Current interests include applications of highly parallel platforms for transcript and protein profiling of minimal sample sizes, and for analysis of genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that regulate gene expression during normal development and in diseased states, specifically pancreatic cancer. He is also funded to study factors involved in the regulation of bud dormancy in Vitis vinifera, and has interests in biodiversity and improvement of third-world agriculture. He has published more than 180 scholarly research articles, holds several patents, was elected a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science in 2002, and serves on the editorial board of Cytometry Part A. He is widely sought as a speaker, having presented over 360 seminars in academic, industrial and conference settings. He was elected Secretary of the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry in 2016. Keywords: Plant and Animal Cellular Engineering; Biological Instrumentation; Flow Cytometry and Sorting

Publications

Galbraith, D. W. (2004). Nuclear dynamics in higher plants.. Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology, 217-228.
Galbraith, D., & Lambert, G. (2012). High-throughput monitoring of plant nuclear DNA contents via flow cytometry. Methods in Molecular Biology, 918, 311-325.
Yuan, J. S., Galbraith, D. W., Dai, S. Y., Griffin, P., & Stewart Jr., C. N. (2008). Plant systems biology comes of age. TRENDS IN PLANT SCIENCE, 13(4), 165-171.
Bourzac, K., Rounseville, M., Zarate, X., Maddula, V., Henderson, D., Luckey, J., Seligmann, B., & Galbraith, D. (2011). A high-density quantitative nuclease protection microarray platform for high throughput analysis of gene expression. Journal of Biotechnology, 154, 68-75.
Xiong, L., Gong, Z., Rock, C. D., Subramanian, S., Guo, Y., Wenying, X. u., Galbraith, D., & Zhu, J. (2001). Modulation of Abscisic Acid Signal Transduction and Biosynthesis by an Sm-like Protein in Arabidopsis. Developmental Cell, 1(6), 771-781.

PMID: 11740939;Abstract:

The phytohormone abscisic acid (ABA) regulates plant growth and development as well as stress tolerance. The Arabidopsis sad1 (supersensitive to ABA and drought) mutation increases plant sensitivity to drought stress and ABA in seed germination, root growth, and the expression of some stress-responsive genes. sad1 plants are also defective in the positive feedback regulation of ABA biosynthesis genes by ABA and are impaired in drought stress induction of ABA biosynthesis. SAD1 encodes a polypeptide similar to multifunctional Sm-like snRNP proteins that are required for mRNA splicing, export, and degradation. These results suggest a critical role for mRNA metabolism in the control of ABA signaling as well as in the regulation of ABA homeostasis. © 2001 Cell Press.