PhD Position: growth-resilience trade-offs in plants

In plants there is a commonly observed trade-off between growth and stress tolerance. Therefore, a highly efficient strategy to survive adverse periods is to stop growing. Regarding flooding stress, it turns out that this is restricted to species from flood prone areas, only these have mastered the art of doing nothing, and are extremely flood tolerant as a result. An important aspect of stopping to grow is to ignore signals that indicate availability of resources (e.g. sugar/energy signalling) and to shut of signals that stimulate growth (hormone signals). At the same time plants have signals that indicate stress, for flooding the gaseous hormone ethylene is important here. 

This PhD project will dissect how distinct components of doing nothing (cell division, cell expansion, deposition of sugars into cell walls, maintenance costs), are regulated by the complex combination of resource, growth and stress signals. To do this end the project can make use of the contrasting behaviour between the model species Arabidopsis thaliana, that is bad at doing nothing when flooded, with the closely related Rorippa sylvestris, which excels at doing nothing when flooded. The project explores the hierarchy between resource, growth, and stress signals on control of growth cessation, builds regulatory networks using genome-scale technologies, and ultimately tests and validates hypotheses with gene-technologies.

Academically, we aim to provide novel insights into how robust and highly redundant growth regulatory networks can evolve, but also how they function to have dynamic growth rates and maintain energy balances. From a human utilitarian perspective, this proposal aims to contribute to crop improvement required to deal with an increased frequency of floods, droughts and other stresses caused by climate change.

(more info: h.van.veen@rug.nl)