Project description
New approaches to protect crops from rising temperatures
Heat waves are causing severe stress to crops and threatening food security. Rising temperatures can lead to diminished yields and crop failures. As such, understanding how plants can rapidly adapt to these conditions is essential for ensuring future food supplies. With this in mind, the ERC-funded PLANTEX project is exploring a new stress response mechanism. Specifically, it will focus on coregulons, which are protein-RNA networks within organelle-like condensates that enable rapid stress adaptation through proteolysis. The project involves mapping these coregulons in Arabidopsis and tomatoes, studying their proteolytic regulation, and developing genetic approaches to enhance heat tolerance in crops. This innovative research could significantly improve crop resilience and food security.
Objective
Heat waves threaten agriculture in the EU and worldwide. Exactly how we can protect our crops precisely and rapidly from heat is a lingering question with important implications for future food security. My aim with PLANTEX is to explore the potential of a rapid stress response that my lab has discovered and incorporate this knowledge into the design of new breeding strategies to improve crops.
To bolster heat tolerance, I propose an innovative approach for the control of protein production networks by repurposing proteolytic pathways that control the dynamics of organelle-like assemblies known as condensates.
My lab pioneers the study of proteolysis on the formation of condensates with unique properties that allow them to store functionally related proteins and RNAs. I dubbed the networks in these condensates that we discovered “coregulons”. These coregulons are responsible for undocumented rapid and synchronized stress responses, for example during heat, that depend on proteolysis. I hypothesize that the discovered condensates ensure an unappreciated rapid response to stress that is important for plant acclimation and that this knowledge can be exploited to engineer desirable traits in crops.
In this project, I propose 1) to use our approaches to collect an extensive dataset of coregulons important for growth and environmental adaptation in the model organism Arabidopsis and the agricultural-relevant crop tomato, 2) to characterize novel mechanisms involving proteolysis of coregulons by refining and developing new approaches of protease-substrate capture, and 3) design and implement innovative strategies based on cutting-edge genetic approaches to improve the tolerance of tomato to heat waves.
My objectives are ambitious but potentially game-changing by providing approaches that can help combat the escalating problem of food security and for our comprehension of how plants adapt to dynamic environments.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
70013 Irakleio
Greece