SugarOsmoSignalling · Analysis of sugar- and osmo-signalling mechanisms in cell wall integrity maintenance

Analysis of sugar- and osmo-signalling mechanisms in cell wall integrity maintenance

Plant cell walls represent the largest source of renewable biomass and significant scientific and economic efforts are aimed at modifying cell wall composition in a controlled manner to facilitate bioenergy production. In addition, cell walls form a defence barrier against pathogen infection, making them also attractive targets for crop protection. However, cell walls are not invariant, but dynamically adapt to different growth and stress conditions to ensure survival and adaptation of the plant to the environment. Recently, it has become obvious that they also adapt to targeted changes and neutralize them, hampering optimization of food crop performance and facilitation of bioenergy production from plants in a sustainable manner. The mechanism enabling this adaption, called the plant cell wall integrity (CWI) maintenance mechanism, appears to be functionally conserved across the plant kingdom and can be also found in other organisms, such as yeast. In this project, we investigated the mode of action of the plant CWI maintenance in the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana, which is frequently used as green test tube to facilitate targeted follow up studies in crop species. We were interested in understanding how plants detect cell wall damage and how the initial signal is passed on to activate downstream responses. Previously it was shown that carbohydrate metabolism is strongly affected by cell wall damage. Here we aimed to elucidate how metabolic signalling could be involved in the CWI maintenance mechanism. Since cell wall damage occurs frequently during pathogen infections, another objective of our work was to elucidate the coordination of pathogen defence with CWI maintenance. Finally, we aimed to increase our knowledge on the influence of osmotic pressure on cell wall damage responses. In summary, we identified novel components required for osmo-sensitive CWI maintenance signalling and successfully gained insights into the mechanism coordinating pathogen defence with CWI maintenance. This increased understanding of the regulatory mechanisms will facilitate generation of novel crop varieties, which allow food and bioenergy production in a more sustainable manner.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union