Objective
The primary objective of this application is to identify and characterise key elements regulating the plant responses to developmental and environmental signals transduced by abscisic acid (ABA). The concentration of effort will be on the acquisition of dormancy and desiccation tolerance by the zygotic embryo in seed, and of drought and cold tolerance during vegetative growth. This programme will aim to identify biological targets that can be exploited in agriculture and industry, notably to improve the seed characteristics and the growth performance of crop species under adverse environmental conditions, including those encountered in the dry South and in the cool North. 1) Work by many laboratories, including the present partners, has clearly established the critical role of ABA in the above processes. Time is thus now ripe to attempt improving these agronomically important traits by manipulating ABA action in transgenic plants. We will do so by challenging all steps in ABA action. We will try to: i) optimize the ABA signal strength by manipulating ABA biosynthesis, ii) optimize the transduction of the ABA signal by manipulating key signalling elements , and iii) to manipulate the genes that are the targets of the ABA cascades. We will do so in Arabidopsis as a model system and also in selected crop species (sunflower, oilseed rape) of direct agricultural relevance. Because of time constraints, these tests will be performed using genes that have already been characterised by the partners. 2) In parallel, we will accomplish an in- depth analysis of the mechanisms of ABA action, with the clear objective of identifying additional biological targets for the rationale improvement of crop species. Again, our work will encompass all steps in the ABA cascade. We will clone and characterize additional ABA biosynthetic genes. We will combine diverse mutant screens in order to "saturate" the ABA signal transduction network with mutations, and we will clone several of the corresponding loci. We will also investigate the involvement of second messengers by analysing ABA signalling at the single cell level.
Finally, we will ascribe a functional role to proteins expressed during desiccation- and cold-tolerance.
This project assembles 11 academic partners which have accumulated a wide spectrum of complementary tools and expertise in physiology, genetics, molecular biology and biophysics for the analysis of ABA action, 1 industrial partner with expertise in desiccation tolerance of germinated seeds, and 1 industrial partner with expertise in developing and evaluating genetically modified oilseed rape and sunflower.
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.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteins
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturegrains and oilseedsoilseeds
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsmutation
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiophysics
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmolecular biology
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
91190 GIF SUR YVETTE
France