Skip to content

Welcome to the department of Plant Systems Biology

Home Functional genomics projects Systems biology of leaf growth
Systems biology of leaf growth
small_for_web_site Arabidopsis GROwth Network integrating OMICS technologies, in short AGRON-OMICS, is an integrated project supported by the European 6th Framework Programme. It focuses on the study of the processes involved in leaf growth and their interactions.
Plants are crucial to mankind as they supply food, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and renewable sources of materials and energy. Yet the processes by which they grow are poorly understood.

Although some of the key factors involved in plant organ growth have already been identified, the circuitry that links the different levels of organisation (whole plant, organ, cell, molecular module, molecule) remains to be uncovered. Fortunately, for the first time, techniques exist or can be developed to characterise a multicellular system exhaustively at all relevant levels.
The main goals of AGRON-OMICS are:

  1. to survey systematically with an array of high throughput methods what are the molecular components driving growth in the cells of a developing Arabidopsis leaf,
  2. to understand how these elements interact and coordinate their action across levels of organisation, and
  3. to explain quantitative growth phenotypes at the molecular level through inference and mathematical modelling, followed by further experimentation.

Visit the AGRON-OMICS web site for more information about this project.