Publikationen - Molekulare Signalverarbeitung

Plants have a remarkable capacity to adjust their growth and development to elevated ambient temperatures. Increased elongation growth of roots, hypocotyls, and petioles in warm temperatures are hallmarks of seedling thermomorphogenesis. In the last decade, significant progress has been made to identify the molecular signaling components regulating these growth responses. Increased ambient temperature utilizes diverse components of the light sensing and signal transduction network to trigger growth adjustments. However, it remains unknown whether temperature sensing and responses are universal processes that occur uniformly in all plant organs. Alternatively, temperature sensing may be confined to specific tissues or organs, which would require a systemic signal that mediates responses in distal parts of the plant. Here, we show that Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) seedlings show organ-specific transcriptome responses to elevated temperatures and that thermomorphogenesis involves both autonomous and organ-interdependent temperature sensing and signaling. Seedling roots can sense and respond to temperature in a shoot-independent manner, whereas shoot temperature responses require both local and systemic processes. The induction of cell elongation in hypocotyls requires temperature sensing in cotyledons, followed by the generation of a mobile auxin signal. Subsequently, auxin travels to the hypocotyl, where it triggers local brassinosteroid-induced cell elongation in seedling stems, which depends upon a distinct, permissive temperature sensor in the hypocotyl.

Sugarcane mosaic virus (SCMV) is an important disease in maize, which is emerging in Germany since 1983. Using this pest as a model for the inheritance of oligogenic traits, we clarified the genetic ba­sis for resistance in early maturing European maize germplasm. Screening of 122 adapted European inbred lines identified three completely resistant lines, which were used for further analyses. The genetics of SCMV resis­tance was investigated by allelism tests in field experiments combined with QTL and bulked segregant analyses (BSA) on the marker level. QTL analyses revealed the presence of two major genes Scm1 and Scm2 plus three minor QTL. Involvement of Scm1 and Scm2 in the inheritance of SCMV resistance could be confirmed by BSA in a second cross. Breeders can make use of tightly linked STS markers for marker-assisted selection (MAS) as well as our SCMV resistant flint lines to improve their elite germplasm. Currently, recurrent backcrossing with phenotypic selection is the most appropriate and cost effective breeding method. With de­creasing costs of DNA chip technology, MAS can be competitive with phenotypic selection in the near future. Further objectives of our research are the isolation and cloning of Scm1 and Scm2. To achieve this goal we follow two different approaches. (1) Positional cloning based on more than 500 AFLP primer combinations resulted in Scm1/Scm2 specific markers with a resolution of approximately 0.2 cM in the respective re­gions. (2) Resistance gene analogues (RGAs), cosegregating with the tar­get genes are used to identify further candidate genes for transformation experiments.