Скачать или смотреть Brandizzi lab: Plant biology discovery is ‘like a switch between life and death’

Fixed Term Assistant Professor Dae Kwan Ko discusses his latest research published in Nature Plants.

Read more:
Research: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4147...
Website: https://prl.natsci.msu.edu/
Twitter:   / msudoeplantlab  
LinkedIn:   / msudoeplantlab  

Transcript: Endoplasmic reticulum, called ER, is a very important cellular organelle, and it’s critical for many metabolic, cellular and molecular events. Its main job is to fold proteins properly, and dispatch them in right place within cells, so this protein can be functional. In normal conditions there’s a balance between protein-folding capacity and protein-folding demand. But when plants exposed to stress conditions such as drought and heat, the protein folding demand will rise beyond its capacity in the ER. So, they’re creating the lethal condition known as ER stress. And response to ER stress highly is conserved not only across the eukaryotes, but also in plants, yeast and animals.
So ER stress associate with crop productions and many human diseases. In this particular study we’re interested in identify unknown regulators in response to the ER stress. So in this study, we took forward genetic approaches in which we mutagenized and screened for suppression of growth defects in response to ER stress. Then we map the cause of mutation to the genome by sequencing analysis. We experimentally validate the functional roles of the gene that had the mutation in response to ER stress.
In this study we found, when these genes mutated, the growth defect is suppressed under ER stress conditions, which means this gene can serve as a kind of life to death switch. Climate change brings about diverse stress conditions: extreme heat, extreme cold and flooding stress. They all can initiate ER stress. So we think this gene in the system provide us kind of means to engineer crops more resilient to the stress conditions.

Video description: Dae Kwan Ko sits and talks to a camera. We see shots of him entering a door labeled "growth chambers." He opens a growth chamber, which looks like a fridge, and pulls out small clear plates with Arabidopsis seeds growing inside. Later, he sits working at a computer, coding, looking at images of plants, and graphs. We also see Arabidopsis plants in plastic growth pots, inside the growth chambers.

Video by Kara Headley