The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded an ERC Synergy Grant to Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kleine-Vehn at the University of Freiburg, supporting his project, STARMORPH – Unravelling Spatio-temporal Auxin Intracellular Redistribution for Morphogenesis. Over six years, this project will receive a total of 10 million euros, with around 2.5 million euros going to the University of Freiburg.
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ERC Synergy Grant for Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kleine-Vehn
Unlocking the Secrets of Plant Growth
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kleine-Vehn, Image: Jürgen Gocke
As Chair of Molecular Plant Physiology at the Faculty of Biology and spokesperson for the Cluster of Excellence Centre for Integrative Biological Signalling Studies (CIBSS), Kleine-Vehn leads an interdisciplinary and international team focused on auxin, a pivotal plant hormone regulating growth and development. His research aims to reveal how auxin signaling shapes plant morphogenesis from the subcellular to the organ level, exploring its influence on cellular dynamics and overall plant architecture.
With ERC Synergy Grants supporting collaborations of the highest scientific caliber, researchers at the University of Freiburg and their international partners continue to push the boundaries of plant biology, contributing to our fundamental understanding of growth regulation and signaling.
The plant hormone auxin can trigger different effects
Auxin regulates the development of plant organs (morphogenesis). As plants grow, they develop roots and leaves as well as flowers and fruit. The plant hormone auxin can trigger or inhibit growth depending on its concentration and signalling strength. The diverse and complex processes with which auxin is associated seem to contradict its simple molecular structure. Unlike classical hormones, auxin has three receptors in different areas of the cell: in the nucleus, in the cytosol and in the extracellular space.
“The plant hormone auxin regulates an extremely large number of processes in plants, from embryonic development to the formation of flowers and fruits. Yet it is a simple molecule. Understanding how auxin encodes these complex processes gives us the key to plant development. We could use it to open the door to innovations in agriculture,” says Kleine-Vehn.
To gain a holistic understanding of plant morphogenesis, a team of researchers from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, led by Stéphanie Robert, is working together across the fields of molecular cell biology, synthetic biology, organic chemistry, genetics and biophysics. They want to explore an auxin signalling concept that takes into account the auxin level in each compartment and determines an overall signal with quantitative and qualitative cell responses.
If STARMORPH succeeds in understanding the formation of plant organs and the role of auxin in this process, the findings can be used in a variety of ways due to the central function of auxin. According to Kleine-Vehn: “Plants integrate environmental information into their architecture. Auxin also controls growth in response to environmental conditions. In agriculture, such a response to the environment is not necessarily desirable, since one plant looks like another in the field and should still produce a good yield in a stressful environment.”
Original Publication:
Waidmann S, Beziat C, Ferreira Da Silva Santos J, Feraru E, Feraru MI, Sun L, Noura S, Boutte Y, Kleine-Vehn (2023), Endoplasmic reticulum stress controls PIN-LIKES abundance and thereby growth adaptation. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A (IF: 12.779) 120(31) doi: 10.1073/pnas.2218865120.