An interview with Dominique Bergmann

Let's start at the beginning, when did you first become interested in science?

I'm not sure that I was ever not interested, but I wasn't able to put a name to it. I was a kid who played in nature and was interested in general things that are part of science, but I had no clue about what an academic scientist did and there wasn't an ‘aha’ moment where I thought: ‘Oh, this is what I want to do.’ Although I do remember being exposed to fruit fly genetics in my first or second year of high school. I didn't go to a particularly academic high school, and they just let a bunch of kids start doing fruit fly crosses, which was a complete disaster but also very fun. So, I remember that being very cool, but also there being a lot of flies everywhere!

What did you study for your undergraduate degree?

I had an interest in chemistry. That was what I thought I wanted to do, mostly because chemistry seemed to involve setting up something where you have a prediction and you see an answer. By contrast, the biology that I was exposed to was more like ‘here's a taxidermied cat, figure out what its organs are’, which appealed to me less. When I started my undergraduate course, I realised that chemistry wasn't exactly what I was interested in, and I ended up getting a degree in molecular and cellular biology. I hit a sort of sweet spot with biochemistry; it dealt with molecules and concepts that were bigger than chemistry, but it had the element of prediction or hypothesis building and testing.

You completed your PhD at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where you worked with C. elegans. What did your research focus on?

My PhD project was about how left-right asymmetry is set up in C. elegans. Left-right asymmetry is a very big, broad field. Nowadays, we tend to think of it more in the context of mammalian heart looping and all the signalling involved in that. But in C. elegans, the question was really about geometry. Like snails, C. elegans embryos divide in a spiral way, and they're always right-handed. But a left-handed snail or a left-handed worm (or even a reversed human) doesn't have any obvious health issues. So, why is there a bias towards one form of handedness, and what's the mechanism behind it?

It was both the best PhD project in the world and the worst project in the world. It got me into reading all sorts of things, some of it not in the language that I spoke, because this question about handedness was very broad, and had its roots in people just walking on the beach and asking: ‘Why do all the snail shells spiral in one direction?’ But it was also an impossible project, and I failed at it. Twenty years later, I did finally meet the person who succeeded at figuring out what I had been trying to do in my PhD project. It was not something that we would have predicted and wasn't something we could do with the technology at the time, so I felt a little bit vindicated!

I believe you attended the Woods Hole Embryology Course during your PhD. What are your memories of the course, and did it have an impact on your career?

It kept me in science. My PhD project was hitting the ‘worst of projects’ stage in year four; I hadn't made much progress, and I was really doubting a lot of things. I'll credit my PhD advisor, Bill Wood, in that he was kind of a big picture guy, and he thought I might benefit from seeing a wide variety of developmental systems, away from the one that I was working on. So, I went to the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole. At the time, Eric Davidson, who had been teaching the course for decades, had just stepped down, and there were new directors. The course was a combination of marine creatures and model systems, and seeing all these different options got me excited about science again. I was exposed to so much great developmental biology, but it was all animal developmental biology. The irony is that now, of course, I work on plants, so the one thing I was not exposed to at all during the Embryology Course was the organism that I ended up working on! But I do think that the comparative approach at the MBL ultimately led me to plants. I saw all of these different organisms, ranging from species that were really predominant models at the time to creatures that do development in ways that are so wild and out there that we still don't even really know how to think about them.

Picking up on that idea, why did you make the switch to working on Arabidopsis for your postdoctoral research at the Carnegie Institution?

I want to say that it was this grand vision that I had, but it was more based on ideas around funding in the USA, which suggested that if you wanted to do a postdoc then you needed to switch fields. This is not common now, but it was the driving idea at the time. During my PhD, I'd been working on a question that was at the interface between cell biology and developmental biology, involving a lot of geometry (and also mechanics, though we didn't know that at the time) and the question of how cells are organising themselves in this multicellular system. I realised that I loved that puzzle, and that it was really more about the question for me than it was about the experimental system. I interviewed in yeast labs, fly labs and plant labs. Actually, I didn't get any interviews in worm labs (maybe I had a bad reputation already!) and I had learned from Woods Hole that I did not want to work on mice, so I didn't interview in mouse labs. And then for another set of reasons, including wanting to live in the same place as my husband, I ended up working on plants. In retrospect, that was the absolute best decision I could have made, and I'm super happy having made it. But it wasn't as if I had a real plan going in.

You went on to establish your own lab at Stanford University. How did you find the process of becoming a group leader?

Part of it was incredibly easy because I had been doing my postdoc on the same campus, so I literally wheeled all the stuff that I had across to a new building. When my experiments didn't work in my own lab, I could sneak back into my old lab at night and do them! So, that part was great, but suddenly being responsible for a lab, and for the people in my lab, was daunting. I think there was a lot of trial and error on my part, but figuring out what motivates different people has been really rewarding.

What research questions did you initially set out to address when you established your own lab?

I was interested in this question of geometry. My postdoc advisor, Chris Somerville, is not a developmental biologist at all (he was working in bioenergy and on cell walls) but he was extremely good at thinking practically about projects. And he said something like: ‘Ok, you might be interested in this esoteric organisation of things, but who else is going to care about that? How could you make that question a bit broader?’ I realised that the mechanisms I was interested in are involved in making specialised types of cells, so I could either pick a very strange type of cell to work on, or I could pick a cell that matters a lot. For example, neurobiologists who work on asymmetric divisions are studying cells that matter a lot. I ended up working on stomata, which form through asymmetric divisions. Stomata are little cellular valves that allow plants to take in carbon dioxide and release water vapor, so they're important for plants and for the planet, and there is a huge field of people studying them from very different perspectives, including physiology and global ecology. So, to be able to tap into that interest and contribute my little part was key. Again, I have mostly stumbled into things, but in retrospect, this is the perfect system for me in that it has questions at the level that I'm interested in, and the community as a whole is really engaged. So, it was and is important to find something that matters to more people than just me sitting in the lab.

It sounds like there's a diverse community of people who are working on stomata from very different perspectives. I guess that climate change is becoming an increasingly important focus for this research now, too?

Yes, and I think the other thing that is really obvious to me is that I'm no longer doing most of the research in my lab. I have some of the ideas, but other people are doing the experiments, and I think many people of this new generation are trying to say: ‘It's nice that you could work on the geometry of some cells, but let's use science to solve some of the problems that we're facing!’ I've noticed this more and more, with students saying that they want to approach important cells and systems from an environmental flexibility role, or an engineering role. I think people are motivated by different things these days.

Has the focus of your lab shifted since you started it?

Yes and no. I mean, we still work on stomata. But what's amazing to me is that I got a job based on the cutting-edge techniques that I was working on, all of which are now several generations out of date. If I just walk around my lab, 90% of the techniques that my lab members are using didn't even exist when I started the lab. I think that's one of the most important things to do – to embrace these new things that couldn't be done before, or that we didn't even know were possible. So, some of the technical aspects have changed. I think we've also transitioned from a very cell biology-focused approach of studying a few cells together in a very controlled system to acknowledging that stomata exist in the world, and that there's variation. There are differences in genetics, there are different environmental factors. Rather than trying to control for these differences, we are now embracing them and using them to figure out what the key, fundamental, unchanging parts are. Plants can vary in all these different ways, but what are the core processes that they always have to carry out? And how do they buffer those core processes against external changes?

Do you do field work as well, to sample that variation?

We don't, but other people have. That's another thing that's remarkable about plants: their seeds can last in a bag for years, or decades. The plant that we mostly work on, Arabidopsis thaliana, is a self-fertile plant, and it's diploid and homozygous. So, you can pick a plant from the wild and collect its seeds. You can keep those seeds and produce its grandchildren and great grandchildren, and so on for generations and generations. And you can test them all next to each other, and genetically they're all the same because of this descent. So you can capture this history over tens of generations where you can compare those progeny to their parents. You just can't do that in any other system.

Stomata on the surface of plants can also be preserved, both in fossils and in herbarium specimens. A recent postdoc in the lab, Patricia Lang (now an assistant professor at Berkeley, across the San Francisco Bay) did this remarkable set of experiments where she tracked 200 years of how stomata looked on plants from all around the world, as well as studying DNA from 200 years ago. That's field work, even though we received all of those things in the lab and studied them there.

What do you think are the most exciting questions in your field today?

Plants usually respond to an environmental threat or change via development and growth, because they're not going to run away anywhere. So, how can plants make a body that is recognisable as a specific species (for example, an oak tree versus a corn plant) and yet also be able to change it in so many different ways? How do you have a system that is so flexible, can do so many different things, and yet still converges on a stereotyped way of doing things? I think that's fundamentally the biggest question that we have, and people study that in lots of different ways.

We think a lot about how, for humans, it would be wonderful if we could regenerate something that we've lost. Plants are really good at that. You chop off the head of your rose bush and it grows ten more heads. And yet, plants don't accidently make more heads. So, plants have this untapped ability to do so much, and yet only deploy that when it's necessary. That's why plant development, to me, is just the coolest thing ever, and all of the mechanisms that go into that are interesting to different people at different levels.

You were elected to EMBO Membership in 2024, in recognition of your research accomplishments. What does this mean to you?

I was incredibly honoured to become an EMBO Associate Member. I recently came back from that meeting, and I was struck by the fact that EMBO is a multinational scientific community. That got me thinking about the roles of scientists in a multinational setting, and the ways in which early-career researchers can be connected to one another. It's hard to be an early-career scientist, so what forms of support make that possible these days?

It's a great honour to be recognised for what my lab has done scientifically. To become a foreign associate, you have to somehow be connected to Europe, so it meant a lot for EMBO to recognise our efforts to be connected globally to other scientists. It also made me think about ways in which I can try to contribute more to this global community. The political situation is not something that I'm particularly happy about right now, certainly not in the USA, so what are the roles of groups of people, such as scientists, that transcend national borders?

Alongside your research, you are an Editor at Development, handling papers relating to plant developmental biology. What encouraged you to join the team?

I've loved Development as a journal since graduate school, when it was hard copy with a beautiful cover and it would come out almost monthly. My major PhD work was published in Development, so I was very proud of that, and I have a long history of just loving the science of the journal. But I also really like the journal's mission. There are other journals that tell you a lot about all the things that they're doing, whereas Development just does them without necessarily making a whole lot of fuss. They're very creative and progressive and they have good ideas about how to present science and make that available to most people. So I like the ethos of the journal and I like the subject of the journal.

There's always the ‘Plant Editor’ at Development, and I think it's interesting to think about what the purpose of a plant paper in Development is. There are many journals that publish plant papers, so why would you choose to publish something in Development specifically? And I think that comes back to this comparative approach that I've always loved. I think there are great papers from plant biology that are not really what you would put in Development, because they go into detail about a pathway that's super important, but is specific to a plant biology audience. By contrast, there are plant papers investigating more general principles of how organisms work that I think also need to be read by people who are not plant biologists. For example, if you work on animal cells, there are rules about mechanics and how things work, but plants have cell walls, which means those mechanisms are just so different. I think it's important that readers might come across a paper in Development that's about something they think they're familiar with, but that highlights organisms doing that same thing really differently. I very much encourage plant biologists to publish in Development, and I have a particular interest in stories about broad fundamental principles.

You are also active in public engagement and outreach. What sort of projects are you involved with, and why are they important to you?

I have to admit that, in the last couple of years, just because the ability to go out and meet face-to-face with people has been pretty curtailed, we haven't done as much as we used to. But the great thing about plants is that they're everywhere. I think it's valuable to help people realise that they're surrounded by plants, that plants are doing really interesting things, and that they can see them and engage with that themselves. They can be part of that scientific process. For example, they can look at how quickly the leaves fall off the trees in the autumn, and how that varies year by year. That's a developmental process, but it's also very familiar. So, plants are a gateway into thinking about the natural world and about development as part of that, and it's something that people can do on their own, without any fancy lab equipment. There are also a lot of things that are plant-related that are very politicised, such as genetically modified organisms, or how much plants contribute to global climates. This makes plant science outreach even more important.

Finally, what do you enjoy doing outside the lab?

Anything that gets me ‘outside’, literally! I'm very fortunate to live in Northern California, which is a beautiful part of the world. There are mountains and there's the ocean, even though there may not be so many dramatic fall-coloured leaves. So, whether it's hiking or camping or biking, I'd say I mostly enjoy trying to be out there in the world.

Dominique Bergmann was interviewed by Laura Hankins, Reviews Editor of Development. This piece has been edited and condensed with approval from the interviewee.