EU-funded project to shed new light on mysteries of plant growth
In spite of plants' importance to us as a source of food, medicine, energy and materials, very little is known about the biological processes controlling plant growth. Now the European Commission is set to give EUR 12 million to a project called AGRON-OMICS, which will shed new light on the matter. Plants provide us with a range of vital products and services, yet the mechanisms controlling the way plants, and in particular leaves, grow and develop remain poorly understood. Leaves go through four basic stages of development - proliferation, when the number of cells in the leaf increases; cell expansion, when the cells themselves grow in size; maturation, when the cells change their physiological state and become active, for example by photosynthesising; and finally senescence, when the resources in the leaf are moved to other parts of the plant. Currently, very little is known about the signals that cause leaf cells to stop dividing and switch to the growth phase of development. Yet the amount of biomass in a leaf, which is the primary determinant of crop productivity, is determined by number and size of cells in it. As Project Coordinator Pierre Hilson of Ghent University points out, 'With the growing importance of biomass and bioenergy, it is about time that we study the details of biomass accumulation.' The project partners will study the components controlling plant growth, which include genes, proteins and metabolites, and analyse how these coordinate their actions to regulate leaf growth and manage the switch from one phase of development to another. Finally, they will develop mathematical and statistical methods to model and predict leaf processes and test these in close collaboration with computer scientists and experimentalists. The knowledge generated by the project will be relevant for a range of industrial applications such as bioenergies. The plant chosen by the researchers is Arabidopsis thaliana. Since the late 1970s A. thaliana has been the model plant of choice of plant scientists around the world. As well as being small, fast growing, prolific and easily cultivated in the lab, it has a small genome, which makes it eminently suitable for genetic studies. The wealth of research already carried out on A. thaliana (its genome was fully sequenced in 2000) and the thousands of mutant lines available make it ideal for this study. For example, mutant lines exist in which the number of cells in a leaf is abnormally low. However, the plants compensate for this by making the individual cells bigger, so that the overall leaf size remains normal. Other mutants have abnormally small cells, but compensate by producing more of them. Studying mutants like this will help the researchers better understand the interactions between factors controlling leaf growth and development. The AGRON-OMICS (Arabidopsis GROwth Network integrating OMICS technologies) project, which is coordinated by the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology in Ghent, Belgium, brings together researchers from 14 institutes in seven countries. The European Commission's EUR 12 million grant to the project will be one of the biggest grants every given to research into Arabidopsis. The project is due to start in the Autumn and will run for five years.
Countries
Belgium