FOR 5640:  Physiological and Evolutionary Adaptation of Plants to Co-occurring Abiotic and Biotic Challenges

• Subject Area: Biology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 515385982

Plants have evolved to occupy a vast range of distinct habitats, thereby adapting to diverse environmental conditions both on land and in water. Since they cannot physically move from their location, plants possess a range of effective stress response pathways, integrating and accommodating both abiotic and biotic stress to cope with local environmental changes. Research into these stress responses, has more recently, increasingly focussed on plant-associated microbial communities. These may contribute directly and indirectly to stress tolerance. Abiotic stressors on land include drought and increased temperatures; In water habitats, water-logged sediments or soil oxygen deficiency, both exacerbated by warming. Biotic stressors on the other hand include diverse pathogens which exploit plant tissues for growth and reproduction. How plants cope with ubiquitous abiotic and biotic stress is still poorly understood. This interaction requires sophisticated integration by the plant since stress defences are costly and responses to single and combined stressors must be tightly regulated to minimize trade-offs. In the light of global change, insights into plant stress biology are of utmost importance. PlantsCoChallenge establishs a novel integrative framework to study plant stress biology in selected plant species of distinct environmental origins allowing us to tap into the diversity of population-level solutions in coping with stress. The overarching objective of this Research Unit (RU) is to characterize physiological and evolutionary plant adaptations to co-occurring stress in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems while integrating the role of plant microbiota in stress resistance. We will study plant stress responses as they i) are regulated at the subcellular level, with an emerging role of mitochondria as stress integration hubs ii) are expressed and combined at the plant-microbiome level and iii) shape genetic and microbial variation at the population level. Research into common stress combinations has demonstrated that i) different individually applied stressors can elicit either identical or opposing molecular responses resulting in synergistic or inhibitory interactions when applied simultaneously; and ii) responses to combined stressors at the molecular and organismal level are thus largely unique and cannot be extrapolated from responses to individually applied stressors. The overarching hypothesis is that increased abiotic stress following global change will change the spectrum of biotic interaction of plants, including responses to biotic stress in agricultural fields and natural ecosystems. We propose an ambitious research program that will integrate diverse but complementary sets of expertise to study stress responses at different levels of organismal organization across five plant species. We expect that the uniquely integrative and interdisciplinary program holds the potential to make breakthrough discoveries in the field of plant biology.

• DFG Programme: Research Units

Projects

• Capturing the diversity of stress related microbiota from plant endophytic niches (Applicant Kemen, Eric )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Holtgrewe-Stukenbrock, Ph.D., Eva )
• Endophytes and local adaptation modulate aquatic plant responses to warming and anoxia stress (Applicants Hilt, Sabine ;  Reusch, Ph.D., Thorsten )
• Genetic and metabolic determinants of biotic and abiotic stress responses in quinoa (Applicants Emrani, Nazgol ;  Schwarz, Karin )
• Habitat-dependent regulation of cellular respiration in plant oxygen stress- and elicitor responses (Applicants Schwarzländer, Markus ;  Selinski, Jennifer )
• Local co-adaptation of plants and their microbiota to climatic stress (Applicants Kemen, Eric ;  Schrieber, Karin )
• Plant stress responses across five species (Applicant Waschina, Silvio )
• Quantitative disease resistance and microbial interactions under abiotic stress (Applicant Holtgrewe-Stukenbrock, Ph.D., Eva )

• Spokesperson: Professorin Eva Holtgrewe-Stukenbrock, Ph.D.