Abstract:
Development of a plant depends on the acquisition of essential nutrients from its rhizosphere. Despite being hidden below the surface, plant roots are the organs responsible to sense their environment and adjust their architecture in order to more efficiently take up water and nutrients. The long-term root architectural changes are well described, but these probably depend on early sensing of the situation surrounding the roots and a trigger of some signalling to allow for developmental changes. These open questions were the basis of the HortiRoot lab, where the main goal is to increase the knowledge on fast responses on nutrient-depletion induced root responses. To enable fast screening of root responses, novel technology had to be implemented. This resulted in a novel phenotyping setup using vertical flatbed scanners on which high resolution images are taken at short time intervals (minutes). We are integrating automated image analysis (a combination of hard-coded script lines, with a trained neural network and probability calculations) to obtain quantitative data on different root parameters. This approach is what we call furious, because we dove deeply into some engineering and programming approaches to develop this screening platform. It will be used for GWAS screening of different Arabidopsis ecotypes to find nutrient-dependent variation. Besides this macro observation of root characteristics, we also developed a microfluidics setup to evaluate immediate changes of nutrient-medium changes at a cellular level. This is what can be called fast, because this allows us to visualize root response within seconds of depleting nutrients. Having the phenotyping technology in hand, we can now determine the timeline of the root’s responses to nutrient depletion, using phosphate as the initially evaluating essential nutrient. Knowing the timeline, allows us to go for OMICs approaches that will allow us to identify signalling elements involved in the nutrient-depletion root responses, which we will then integrate with an investigation in systemic signalling elements that also prime the shoot to the lack of essential nutrients.
Food will be served from 12:00; the presentation starts at 12:15