Maintaining the vitality and yield of flowers, fruits, and seeds
Goals
During its life cycle, a plant goes through various development phases such as leaf formation, flowering, fruit, and seed production. The transition from one developmental phase to the next is influenced by many environmental factors. But how can a plant measure these signals to optimize its reproduction, fruit and seed set under sub-optimal conditions? This team aims to elucidate the underlying molecular networks and to identify so-called ‘hubs’ that control the plant’s vital transitions and reproductive processes under temperature and drought stress. These insights will be deployed to design possible strategies to enable a plant to thrive under sub-optimal conditions.
Approach
The effects of heat and drought and a combination of these two stressors on reproduction processes will be studied in the model plant species Arabidopsis. Stress will be applied at various times during the life cycle. The effects of this stress will be determined for various parameters: gene expression, epigenetic adjustments, phase transitions, reproductive organs, and seed quantity and quality. The obtained data will be used to generate a multiscale model. This model will give information on the plant’s reproduction. Existing mathematical models for the individual reproduction processes will be the basis for this comprehensive multiscale model.
A plant’s lifecycle from seed to seed. Created in BioRender. Immink, R. (2025)
Activities
The team will execute a large-scale and detailed phenotyping investigation of the effects of heat and drought on the plant’s reproduction processes. Phenotyping reflects the way traits are expressed as influenced by genes and changes in the environment. Furthermore, the team examines gene expression and deploys other molecular measurements, bioinformatics, machine learning & mathematical modeling.
Illustration: Data analysis and mathematical modeling to create a multiscale model of robus plant reproduction. Created in BioRender. Immink, R. (2025). https://BioRender.com/j32k546.
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Portrait Froukje van der Wal
Portrait Hazel van Waijjen
Team
Work package leader Richard Immink, Personal Professor Plant Reproduction Biology, WUR
Aalt-Jan van Dijk, Professor Data Analysis, UvA
Froukje van der Wal, Technical Assistant, WUR
Hazel van Waijjen, PhD candidate, WUR
Ivo Rieu, Full Professor of Crop Biotechnology, RU
Kyran Wissink, PhD candidate, UvA
Leónie Bentsink, Personal Professor Seed Science, WUR
Marcel Proveniers, Assistant Professor / Molecular Plant Physiology, UU
Martijn Jansen, Postdoc, WUR