Objective
A plant needs to be able to communicate between its various parts so as to enable one part of the plant to inform the rest of any detected stimulus. This allows a co-ordinated physiological response to any external stimuli.
Electrical signals such as action potentials (APs) are by far the fastest signalling mechanisms in plants. They are able to broadcast information rapidly throughout a plant, so the whole plant can be almost instantaneously notified of any impending threat or change in circumstance. Thus, APs could be vital in the response of plants to environmental stress.
Despite their importance, huge questions remain about the mechanisms behind electrical signalling. Although there is a model for the generation and propagation of plant APs, which involves the cellular influx of calcium and efflux of chloride and potassium through ion channels, little is known about the molecular identify or the regulation of these channels. This is despite the rapidly increasing knowledge about ion transport mechanisms in model plant species such as Arabidopsis thaliana.
Focusing on APs in Arabidopsis, this project aims to fill this gap, with the overall aim of “providing a model describing the molecular mechanisms underlying the inception and the propagation of electrical signals in plant tissues”.
This project will therefore bring together ion transport mechanisms and electrical signalling in Arabidopsis. The involvement and the regulation of the ion channels involved in mediating ion fluxes during an AP will be intensively investigated, resulting finally in a mathematical model of electrical signalling in plants. The proposal will bring together three groups with expertise in (i) molecular electrophysiology of plant ion channels, (ii) electrophysiology, especially in relation to electrical signalling and (iii) computer-assisted mathematical modelling of plant biological processes, along with a returning European electrophysiologist with expertise in ion transport.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistryalkali metals
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistryalkaline earth metals
- natural sciencesmathematicsapplied mathematicsmathematical model
You need to log in or register to use this function
We are sorry... an unexpected error occurred during execution.
You need to be authenticated. Your session might have expired.
Thank you for your feedback. You will soon receive an email to confirm the submission. If you have selected to be notified about the reporting status, you will also be contacted when the reporting status will change.
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2010-RG
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
MC-IRG - International Re-integration Grants (IRG)Coordinator
75794 Paris
France