Project description:Foxtail millet (Setaria italica L. P. Beauv) has been considered as a tractable model crop in recent years due to its short growing cycle, lower repetitive DNA, inbreeding nature, small diploid genome, and outstanding abiotic stress-tolerance characteristics. With modern agriculture often facing various adversities, it’s urgent to dissect the mechanisms of how foxtail millet responds and adapts to drought and stress on the proteomic-level.
Project description:Climate change is having a drastic impact on global agriculture. Indeed stress factors such as elevated temperature, drought and rising atmospheric CO2 reduce arable land surface, crop cultivation and yield and overall sustainable food production on earth. However, plants possess immense innate adaptive plasticity and a more in-depth understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms is crucial to strategize for sustaining populations under worsening climate change. Brassinosteroids (BRs) are constitutive plant growth regulators that also control plant adaptation to abiotic stress. Downstream components of the BR biosynthetic pathway, BES1/BZR1 play central role in thermomorphogenesis, but involvement of the BR receptors is not well understood. Here, we show that the BRL3 receptor is essential for plant adaptation to warmer environment. The brl3 mutants lack thermal responsiveness and the BRL3 overexpression causes hyper-thermomorphogenesis response. BRL3 activates canonical BRI1 pathway upon elevated temperature. Further, phloem-specific expression of BRL3 completely rescues the growth adaptation defects of the brl3 mutant. This ability of BRL3 represents a previously unknown thermoresponsive mechanism specifically from phloem and uncouples the roles of BR receptors in generic growth vs adaptation to changing climate conditions.
Project description:Changing climate impacts all aspects of plant physiology, photosynthesis being particularly affected. Weather extremes result in imbalances between light capture and its assimilation, leading to photoinhibition of photosynthesis, which affects plant growth and crop yields. The Plastid Terminal Oxidase (PTOX) has been suggested as a photoprotective safety valve for photosynthesis. However, a photoprotective activity has only been observed in a small number of species and its mode of activation remains elusive. Previous attempts to induce photoprotective PTOX activity in additional species have failed. Here, we show for the first time that photoprotection by PTOX can be transferred to non-extremophile species, and that can reduce photoinhibition and ROS production under stress. Our findings provide a basis for new approaches to redesign photosynthesis using PTOX, to help crops face the challenges raised by the current climate change scenario.
Project description:Nitrogen (N) fertilization is essential to maximize crop production. However, around half of the applied N is lost to the environment causing water and air pollution and contributing to climate change. Understanding the natural genetic and metabolic basis underlying plants N use efficiency is of great interest to reach an agriculture with less N demand and thus, more sustainable. The study of ammonium (NH4+) nutrition is of particular interest, because it mitigates N losses due to nitrate (NO3-) leaching or denitrification. In this work, we performed gene expression analysis in the root of the model plant for C3 grasses Brachypodiyum distachyon, reference accession Bd21, grown with exclusive NH4+ or NO3- supply.
Project description:Millet is a dangerous weed in Hungary. Lack of seed dormancy helps it to spread easily and be present at maize, wheat and other crop fields. Our previous report revealed the possibility that millet can also play a role as a virus reservoir. In that study we detected the presence of several viruses in millet using DAS ELISA. Because serological methods can only detect the presence of the investigated particular pathogens, we suspected that other, previously unknown viruses can also be present in this weed. To investigate this theory, we randomly sampled two locations and collected millets showing stunting, chlorosis, and striped leaves and investigated the presence of viruses using small RNA HTS as a diagnostic method. Our result confirmed the widespread presence of wheat streak mosaic virus at both locations. Moreover, barley yellow striate mosaic virus and barley virus G were also identified, which have not been described from Hungary before. As these viruses can cause severe diseases on wheat, their presence on a weed mean a potential infection risk. Our study indicates that the presence of millets on the fields needs a special control in order to prevent emergence of new diseases at crop fields.
Project description:Pearl millet is a major cereal crop that feeds more than 90 million people worldwide in arid and semi-arid regions. The stalk phenotypes of Poaceous grasses are critical for their productivity and stress tolerance, however, the molecular mechanisms governing stalk development in pearl millet remained to be deciphered. In this study, we spatiotemporally measured 19 transcriptomes for stalk internodes of four different early developmental stages. Data analysis of the transcriptomes defined 4 developmental zones on the stalks and identified 12 specific gene sets with specific expression patterns across the zones. Using weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA), we found that 2 co-expression modules together with candidate genes were involved in stalk elongation and thickening of pearl millet. Among the elongation-related candidate genes, we established by SELEX that a MYB-family transcription factor PMF7G02448 can bind to the promoters of three cell wall synthases genes (CesAs). In summary, these findings provide insights into stalk development and offer potential targets for future genetic improvement of pearl millet.