Periodic Reporting for period 3 - PLANTGROWTH (Exploiting genome replication to design improved plant growth strategies)
Reporting period: 2022-06-01 to 2023-11-30
So far we have focused in generating a series of tools necessary to tackle the project objectives. These include the generation of transgenic plants specifically tailored for each objective, such as plants expressing markers for cell cycle analysis, plants expressing chromatin modifying enzymes targeted to specific genomic locations, testing a collection of mutants for phenotypic characteristics towards resistance to abiotic stress). These constitute a good complementation of molecular, cellular, genetic and genomic strategies.
We have also analyzed the role of two components of the pre-replication complex, ORC1a and ORC1b, and are analyzing the molecualr determinants of DNA replication origins.
We expect to have delivered several tools, invaluable not only for this project but also for the plant community. Some have been already generated, such a plant line that allows the possibility to determine the cell cycle parameters, useful to correlate with organ growth. Others are in progress. In addition, preliminary experiments have identified a series of mutants in DNA replication proteins that appear to have a better performance and growth under conditions of abiotic stress, such high salinity or drought. These are being now evaluated in more detail to identify the mechanisms involved and what kind of information obtained in the model plant Arabidopsis could be transferred to crop plants of economic interest.