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Project properties |
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| Title | <b>Glow-in-the-dark plants</b> to visualize insect-plant interactions |
| Group | Entomology, Laboratory of |
| Project type | thesis |
| Credits | 24-36 |
| Supervisor(s) | Karen Kloth, Maarten Jongsma |
| Examiner(s) | Marcel Dicke |
| Contact info | karen.kloth@wur.nl |
| Begin date | 2022/09/01 |
| End date | 2023/09/01 |
| Description | An exciting way to study insect-plant interactions is by engineering luminescent plants. Luminescence is spontaneous emission of light due to a chemical reaction. You can create glowing plants by genetic transformation with a luminescent enzyme, such as luciferase. If you express this enzyme under a promoter of a plant defense gene, the emitted light will visualize when and where plants activate their defense response against insects.
Usually, you need to spray luminescent plants with a chemical substrate before they can emit light. But recently, autoluminescent plants have been created that glow without the need of applying a substrate. This technique allows plants to produce the caffeic acid derived substrate 3-hydroxyhispidin for the NnLuz luciferase from mushrooms. As a result, transgenic plants can be made which day and night radiate light which can be seen with the (adapted) naked eye in a dark room and photographed or filmed with a regular smartphone (https://light.bio/media). This opens up many new possibilities for studying insect-plant interactions. You can work at the forefront of this new scientific technique by developing genetic constructs to visualize plant defenses to insects with the only requirement of full darkness when a picture is taken. Fast infiltration methods will allow to start imaging insect-plant interactions already a few days after completing the construct in Agrobacterium. For this project, we are looking for a student interested in engineering such constructs and performing live-imaging of autobioluminescent plants under insect attack. You do not necessarily need to have full experience with cloning and agroinfiltration, most important is that you are motivated to gain hands-on experience in the molecular lab and to work at the forefront of this new technique. You will work under the supervision of the Lab. of Entomology and Wageningen Plant Research, cluster Bioscience. *** This project can be a thesis or research practice *** *** See these movies of autobioluminescent plants: https://light.bio/media *** |
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| Requirements | FABI, MABI or other ENT courses |