PRIN 2017 - 2017FBS8YN_005 - Dario Di Silvestre (DSB.AD008.532)

Area tematica

Scienze biomediche

Area progettuale

Struttura responsabile del progetto di ricerca

Istituto di tecnologie biomediche (ITB)

Responsabile di progetto

DARIO DI SILVESTRE
Telefono: 0226422724
E-mail: dario.disilvestre@itb.cnr.it

Abstract

1. The problem - Food and feed availability must clearly increase significantly to meet the future demands of the increasing world population. This places great strain on agriculture, since the available arable land is limited and climate change negatively affects crop production.
2. The proposed solution - One solution is to breed for higher yielding crops that are more tolerant to stresses, thus novel genes and allelic variants conferring higher tolerance to abiotic and biotic stressful conditions need to be identify. We will contribute to this aspect by investigating the molecular details of the newly discovered chloroplast and mitochondrial Unfolded Protein Response (UPR) pathways in Arabidopsis, regarded as major stress responses activated by abiotic stresses or biotic agents, upon the accumulation of misfolded or unfolded proteins in the two organelles. In particular, we propose an integrated functional genomic approach, which involves the use of Arabidopsis mutants with active chloroplast- and mitochondrial-UPR signaling pathways, triggered by defects in organelle protein homeostasis. A high-throughput quantitative proteomic analysis from Arabidopsis mutant and WT seedlings

Obiettivi

Our project aims at identifying key regulators of the recently discovered plant organelle Unfolded Protein Response (UPR), whereby stressed mitochondria and chloroplasts convey information to the nucleus to modulate the expression of nuclear genes and prevent accumulation of misfolded or unfolded proteins. We are mainly interested in identifying the retrograde molecular components that act as signals between the organelles and the nucleus, since the organelle UPR is regarded as a major plant stress response which is activated by either abiotic stresses or biotic agents.
To reach our objective, we propose an integrated functional genomic approach that involves the use of Arabidopsis mutants with active chloroplast and mitochondrial UPR signaling pathways. A
high-throughput quantitative proteomic analysis will be combined with the RNAseq approach to provide a comprehensive picture of organelle UPR. Advanced bioinformatics tools will be employed to define a list of candidate genes/proteins involved in organelle UPR. Finally, the basic information gained from Arabidopsis will be transferred to barley in order to prepare a toolbox of allelic variants and accessions for future proposals,

Data inizio attività

19/06/2019

Parole chiave

organelle, UPR, mitochondria

Ultimo aggiornamento: 26/04/2025