M
etal-heavy grasses were what
grabbed Siobhán Brady’s attention.
It was the mid-’90s, she was in
her first year at the University of Toronto
(U of T), and she was learning about
grass varieties that can tolerate taking up
normally toxic heavy metals. Having grown
up in Canada visiting Lake Erie beaches,
some of which had to be closed at times to
remove metals originating in nearby steel
factories from the sand, Brady “was pretty
enamored by the fact that you could use a
natural part of the environment to be able
to fix what humans had done to destroy it,”
she says. In this case, the potential solution
was growing the grasses in contaminated
soil, then harvesting them and disposing
of the concentrated contaminants. “I was
just totally smitten and decided that this is
what I wanted to do for the rest of my life...
explore plants.”
That first year at university was,
academically, “a total disaster,” she says,
but she found her groove the following
year, doing research on Arabidopsis thaliana
in a plant pathology lab headed by Robin
Cameron, now at McMaster University.
Brady loved the research environment and
the process of following the precise steps of
a protocol, troubleshooting that protocol, and
improving it, she says. “It satisfied something
very deep inside of me.”
Brady remained at U of T for graduate
school, joining the lab of Peter McCourt
and initially looking for Arabidopsis genes
encoding proteins that interact with the plant
hormone abscisic acid. While the project
yielded some information, including details
on other hormone pathways that interact
with the abscisic acid pathway, Brady never
did find the mutated genes she was looking
for (Plant J, 34:67–75, 2003). She says
she learned a lot from that experience, or
example that hard work couldn’t compensate
for an overly complicated experimental
design. Her takeaway: “One should alwaysdesign relatively straightforward experiments
where the answer is going to be very clear.”
In a second PhD project, Brady built an
algorithm to mine transcriptomic data to
determine how sequences within the plant’s
gene promoters related to root development
(Plant J, 43:153–63, 2005). She earned her
doctorate in 2005.
Brady’s research interests led her to
apply for a postdoc with developmental
biologist Philip Benfey at Duke University.
Benfey says he recognized at the time that
Brady had enormous potential. “She had
a way of describing her work and thinking
about it that, to me, showed that she had
the ability to go beyond what she’d actually
accomplished,” he explains.
In Benfey’s lab, Brady’s research involved
analyzing the mRNAs present in individual
cell types in Arabidopsis roots during different
stages of development to reveal the patterns of
gene expression that enabled their growth and
maturation. One of her findings, Benfey notes,
is that not only are there genes that are turned
on and stay on during development, but also
“an oscillating set of genes that would turn
on and turn off again, and then turn back on
again” (Science, 318:801–806, 2007).
Brady was intrigued by how plant
cells regulate the types of changes in
transcription she saw in her postdoc
research. When she started her own
lab at the University of California,
Davis, in 2009, she had trouble
finding funding for Arabidopsis
research, so she switched to
carrying out studies in tomato
and sorghum. Her lab recently
completed a years-long project
to map gene expression and
regulation in individual tomato
cell types—now under review
for publication—that she
says she expects will be
a valuable resource in
researchers’ efforts “tobreed plants that are going to be more able
to tolerate harsh environments.”
As part of her sorghum research, Brady
visited Ethiopia in 2016 with her postdoc
Sharon Gray. While they were there, anti-
government protesters threw rocks at the
car they were riding in, killing Gray. Brady,
who still has difficulty talking about Gray’s
death, teamed up with Gray’s husband
to honor Gray by collecting donations
and applying for university funding to
provide training opportunities for Ethiopian
scientists, particularly women. Brady has
hosted several Ethiopian students for short
research stints, and so far one has earned
a master’s degree in her lab. Her colleague
Richard Michelmore, the director of UC
Davis’s Genome Center, says that Brady is
“a first-rate scientist, but also she cares very
much about the people around her.”JSCIENTIST TO WATCHSiobhán Brady: Root Detective
DAVID SLIPHER, UC DAVIS COLLEGE OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
45BY SHAWNA WILLIAMSVOL. 35 ISSUE 2 | THE SCIENTIST