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Project properties |
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| Title | The fountain of youth; Boosting plant regeneration using novel peptides. |
| Group | Molecular Biology, Laboratory of |
| Project type | thesis |
| Credits | 18-39 |
| Supervisor(s) | Dr. Martijn Fiers |
| Examiner(s) | Prof. Dr. R. Immink |
| Contact info | Martijn.Fiers@wur.nl |
| Begin date | 2020/02/01 |
| End date | 2024/04/01 |
| Description | The Netherlands is world leading in agriculture and plant breeding, but the current agricultural system has a substantial negative impact on our climate, demands enormous input of scarce resources, such as fresh water, nitrate, and phosphate, and is polluting. To make the transition to a more sustainable production, it is essential to improve the resilience of crops to abiotic stresses, to produce more robust cultivars capable of dealing with different pests and diseases. To realize this, the use of new plant breeding techniques, is an absolute requirement.
The major bottle-neck for the speedy introduction for novel traits in any crop, is the possibility to regenerate entire plants from single cells. This includes edited or mutated plant cells, generated e.g. by CRISPR-Cas, but also for a large variety of classical and novel plant breeding expedients, such as microspore development, cell fusion, and micropropagation. For all these breeding technologies the process of REGENERATION is essential. Plants are generally considered as being totipotent, meaning that potentially from any cell an intact plant can be (re)generated. Nevertheless, the regeneration process is complex and depending on species- or cultivar-specific physiological and genetic factors, which are still largely unknown. While protoplast regeneration protocols are implemented in different crops, many species remain difficult or even recalcitrant in culture. Regeneration and shoot induction is still a bottleneck in modern precision breeding programs and innovative approaches to induce regeneration and transformation are essential. Hence, the process of regeneration remains the main bottle-neck for the broad application of multiple breeding techniques. In this project we want to induce the regeneration capacity in recalcitrant crops during the breeding process in a reversible manner, to speed-up the breeding process, and as such the introduction of beneficial traits and of novel sustainable crops. We will use a novel screen to identify bio-active peptides/compounds that can trigger the regeneration potential and enhance the regeneration from protoplasts into plantlets. Protoplasts will be incubated with different, concentrations of, peptides to increase the regeneration. During this process RNA will be extracted to determine which, classes, of genes are influenced by the peptides and can possible enhance the regeneration. |
| Used skills | Applied technologies:
- General molecular biology tools; cloning of DNA vectors, RNA and DNA isolation, qPCR etc. - Performing Chemical Genomics; ea. Screening of different peptides and compounds. - General tissue culture techniques Based on your preferences a selection of techniques can be made. |
| Requirements | For BSc thesis: MOB20306
For MSc thesis: MOB30306, MOB31303, MOB30806 or equivalent |