Project Details
Description
Abiotic stress presents an increasing threat to global food production. Drought and soil salinity disrupt plant growth and development, and ultimately crop yield. Plant stress responses have been characterized, but solutions to increase stress resilience are limited, mostly due to the complex nature of stress responses at the whole plant level. Salt and water stress perturb general plant hormone homeostasis, in particular that of the long-distance signalling hormones auxin and abscisic acid (ABA), thereby compromising developmental pathways in root and shoot.
From our latest published and preliminary data, a new concept for developmental plasticity has emerged: plants utilize novel stress-induced signalling pathways to precisely control their growth and development locally, at sub-organ level, when under stress. Here, I propose to elucidate these local salt and water stress-induced pathways in roots and shoots, to understand and subsequently exploit regulators of developmental plasticity to increase stress resilience of plants.
I will do so following four independent, but interconnected approaches: I will first identify local salt and osmotic stress-induced gene expression responses in root and shoot tissues. Belowground, I will focus on novel stress-induced pathways that locally take over from the compromised default developmental pathways, taking both an unbiased approach and a targeted approach in which I will characterize stress-induced regulation, function and molecular products of a complex metabolic pathway that is required for maintaining root branching under adverse environmental conditions. Aboveground, I will investigate how salt regulates the timing of flowering both via default and stress-induced local bypass pathways. Finally, in the fourth approach I will integrate this knowledge to design and validate a strategy to increase stress resilience of plants.
The tissue and stress-specific nature of the pathways addressed provides great potential for engineering stress resilience by novel precision-solutions that do not affect overall plant growth and homeostasis.
From our latest published and preliminary data, a new concept for developmental plasticity has emerged: plants utilize novel stress-induced signalling pathways to precisely control their growth and development locally, at sub-organ level, when under stress. Here, I propose to elucidate these local salt and water stress-induced pathways in roots and shoots, to understand and subsequently exploit regulators of developmental plasticity to increase stress resilience of plants.
I will do so following four independent, but interconnected approaches: I will first identify local salt and osmotic stress-induced gene expression responses in root and shoot tissues. Belowground, I will focus on novel stress-induced pathways that locally take over from the compromised default developmental pathways, taking both an unbiased approach and a targeted approach in which I will characterize stress-induced regulation, function and molecular products of a complex metabolic pathway that is required for maintaining root branching under adverse environmental conditions. Aboveground, I will investigate how salt regulates the timing of flowering both via default and stress-induced local bypass pathways. Finally, in the fourth approach I will integrate this knowledge to design and validate a strategy to increase stress resilience of plants.
The tissue and stress-specific nature of the pathways addressed provides great potential for engineering stress resilience by novel precision-solutions that do not affect overall plant growth and homeostasis.
Status | Active |
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Effective start/end date | 1/01/21 → … |
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