Plant Abiotic Stress

The main goal of our group is to understand, at the molecular level, the plant’s reaction to suboptimal environmental conditions such as high light and UV-B radiation, water shortage/drought periods, interaction with air pollutants and heavy metals. There is growing concern that the interaction of abiotic environmental stressors will affect the plant’s growth, biomass production and yield quality. To understand these mechanisms in more detail the available “omics”-technologies (e.g. transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolite analyses) will be applied. The projects focus on Arabidopsis thaliana, Ambrosia artemisiifolia, as well as important trees of Europe. To identify genes involved in the plant’s reaction upon abiotic stress, experiments will be carried out under controlled environmental conditions in climate chambers and in the greenhouse. Single and combined stress factors will be analyzed at the levels mentioned above. Since controlled environmental conditions will not reflect realistic complex outdoor conditions results obtained will then be transferred to the field. The projects will try to identify genes and genetic traits that are important for stress responses and the fitness of plants under changed environmental conditions.