Objective
To compensate for a reduced spatial mobility, plants have evolved a large developmental and adaptive plasticity to cope with environmental fluctuations. Under adverse conditions, such as abiotic stress, this plasticity is of paramount importance for plant survival. It is now clear that adaptation responses in plants are complex at the molecular level and occur through fine tuning and coordination of specific networks of signals and genes. Additionally, increasing evidence points to considerable cross talk between developmental and stress responsive signalling. Plants strive to maintain a developmental steady state which confers the highest competitive advantage in a given environment. The main objective of the research in this proposal is to identify key regulators of highly stress adaptable plant developmental states, in silico. The common denominator for developmental states with a high stress tolerance is a high cellular energy homeostasis. These developmental states are characterized by having a high abiotic stress tolerance, such as that of young leaves, sink tissues, seedlings and plants acclimated to long days or supplemented with sucrose. We will focus on the identification of regulators in hormonal and redox networks since these are determinative for both development and stress tolerance. Using in-house developed algorithms for meta-analysis of microarray data sets we will make an in silico predictive identification of the regulators. The predicted regulators will be validated by creating knock-out and overexpression lines that will be tested and analyzed for broad stress tolerance. This will be performed in Arabidopsis plants. In summary, this project will explore the poorly studied field of stress adapted developmental states as an innovative tool to identify novel genes and functions in plants. This strategy may contribute to an increased ability for engineering of high yielding crops in a changing global environment.
Fields of science
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-IEF-2008
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)Coordinator
9052 ZWIJNAARDE - GENT
Belgium