Molecular mechanisms of growth-resilience trade to abiotic and biotic stress
Goals
Plants are champions of plasticity. This means that they can acclimate to a broad range of environmental challenges and survive. However, this plasticity often comes at the cost of trade-offs. How does a plant balance stress resilience and growth? The team of Molecular mechanisms of growth-resilience trade-offs tries to answer this question by deciphering the molecular and genetic networks that plants use to regulate trade-offs between growth and stress resilience. Understanding these molecular trade-off networks provides an exciting opportunity to influence a plant’s growth and resilience.
Approach
The team investigates trade-offs between shoot growth and resilience to stresses caused by other organisms and the environment. It obtains results by deploying various methodologies. These include integrated protein biochemistry, genetics, bioinformatics, physiology, transcriptomics, phenomics, and computational modelling approaches. In addition, the team contributes its unique expertise in proteomics technologies to other work packages and programs of CropXR. This enhances insights of mechanistic processes regulating growth-resilience trade-offs.
Activities
The team aims to unravel a variety of core regulatory networks in plants. Which genes and proteins regulate the trade-offs at different levels? To answer this question, the team examines protein complexes that regulate gene expression, protein stability and functions of chloroplasts (the photosynthetic organelles). In addition, unbiased genetic variation screens and novel insights from the Demonstrator work package and other work packages may provide additional leads for the quest to resolve the mechanisms of growth-resilience trade-offs. The team will work closely together to combine expertise in molecular biology, genetics, -omics, machine learning and computational modelling. This close collaboration will enable the team to extract fundamental knowledge from complex datasets. It will then translate this knowledge into strategies that improve the resilience of crops.
Team
Work package leader: Ronald Pierik, Professor of Molecular Biology, WUR
Charlotte Gommers, Assistant Professor Plant Physiology, WUR
Dmitry Lapin, Assistant Professor, UU
Dolf Weijers, Professor of Biochemistry, WUR
Linfei Guo, PhD candidate, WUR
Marcel Reinders, Professor of Bioinformatics, TU Delft
Mark Roosjen, Proteomics support, WUR
Nienke van der Wal, PhD candidate, UU
Robert Winter, PhD candidate, WUR