|
|
Oxidative stress & Cell death
|
 Suboptimal growth conditions caused by drought, temperature, salt and pathogen-related stress are leading to worldwide yield losses in cultivated crops. It is anticipated that this problem becomes even bigger in the future, as climatic changes will cause more temperature and drought stress, and, in the meantime, the demand for plants for food, feed and bioenergy is increasing. This has encouraged the development of appropriate breeding strategies targeting adaptation and has made crop stress tolerance a major objective in plant biotechnology research.
Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) have emerged as important regulators of plant stress responses. Perturbation in ROS production and/or scavenging are sensed by plant cells as a ‘warning’ message and genetic programs leading to stress acclimation or cell death are switched on. Knowledge on regulatory events during ROS signal transduction is now only scratching the surface. Through a combined top-down and bottom-up genomics approach we are dissecting the gene network governing ROS signal transduction in plants and pinpoint genes that are potential candidates for innovative molecular breeding strategies to develop stress-tolerant crops. A second cornerstone of the group studies the function of metacaspases and their inhibitors in Arabidopsis thaliana.
|
|
|
Oxidative stress & Cell death
|
 Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are key players in the regulation of plant development, stress responses and programmed cell death. A fine-tuned balance between ROS production and scavenging is hence crucial for plant survival. In Arabidopsis this delicate ROS management is steered by a gene network that comprises at least 152 genes (Mittler et al., 2004). While the importance of ROS for cellular signaling has been established, relatively little is known about how ROS stimuli are perceived, transduced. |
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Oxidative stress & Cell death
|
 Metacaspases are a recently discovered family of distant caspase homologs in plants, fungi and protozoa. Caspases are cysteine-dependent aspartate-specific proteases that play a prominent role as the “death executioners” in apoptotic cell death in mammalian systems. Caspases cut a wide range of apoptotic substrates finally resulting in cell death. In plants, programmed cell death shares morphological features with mammals, although the molecular mechanisms underlying this process are mostly unknown. |
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Oxidative stress & Cell death
|
|
Group members
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Oxidative stress & Cell death
|
 Here you find an overview and a link of our publications over the last years.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
|
|
|
Oxidative stress & Cell death projects
