Serving as final electron acceptor in respiration, the availability of oxygen in our planet’s atmosphere provided the efficient energy metabolism to drive evolution of complex multicellular organisms, including plants. Plants are remarkable in that they can produce their own oxygen via the hydrolysis of water during photosynthesis, but they also lack an active oxygen transport mechanism like those evolved in metazoans.
Therefore, environmental conditions where oxygen is limited (hypoxia) such as during flooding stress, pose a severe threat to plant survival and can lead to death when prolonged. However, it has been shown that several plant tissues exist in a state of chronic hypoxia, including maize anthers, lateral root primordia, germination and shoot apical meristems. This suggests that local hypoxia may play a positive role in regulating developmental processes, despite causing energy crisis in other plant tissue.
This ERC project challenges the paradigm of hypoxia as a solely stressful condition and investigates how local hypoxia might regulate meristem development and the growth of differentiating organs. This will be addressed through 1) the development of genetically encoded oxygen biosensors, which will unlock the ability to visualize and understand the role of oxygen gradients in plant tissue. 2) Genetic manipulation of the oxygen sensing machinery to test if and how oxygen gradients may affect plant development. The novel insights on how oxygen levels regulate development and the tools developed in this project may also lead to new innovations in order to improve growth and flooding stress resilience.
