Plants are continuously challenged by sometimes life-threatening changes in their environment. These can severely impact their development and even kill plants. Interestingly, plants can flexibly adjust their development to deal with these environmental changes. They can for example adjust root anatomy to resist drought, overall root architecture to forage for nutrients, and shoot architecture to escape from shade or submergence. In order to ascertain optimal development, plants have evolved a broad variety of mechanisms of developmental plasticity.
In this course we discuss how plants control their development, how plants sense the environmental cues flooding and salinity, and how environmental signalling controls plant development. You will be learning to combine knowledge from molecular genetics, physiology, and functional genomics to understand plant organismal development and the interaction with the environment. This course combines lectures with hands-on practice in wet lab practicals and data labs.
This course moves beyond textbook knowledge to recent research in plant developmental plasticity under environmental stress. You will explore how signalling molecules, gene expression, and physiology integrate across scales to regulate plant development. Salinity and flooding serve as key case studies. Through lectures, wet labs and data labs, you will practice the full scientific cycle—from hypothesis to data analysis—gaining hands-on experience with phenotyping, molecular analysis, and genomics tools. The course prepares you for academic research in plant science, combining theory with experimental work using real data and techniques from the field.