Plants in global change: First annual meeting of the DFG Research Unit 'PlantsCoChallenge'

Since last year, the DFG Research Unit (RU) 5640 "PlantsCoChallenge (PCC): Physiological and Evolutionary Adaptation of Plants to Co-occurring Abiotic and Biotic Challenges" at Kiel University has been working on its transdisciplinary research programme, which aims to gather new insights into the effects of global change on the plant world. Since Monday, 29 September, the PCC members are holding their first annual meeting, compiling and discussing the initial results of the joint research project coordinated at Kiel University. In addition to Kiel University's plant researchers, the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, the Universities of Münster and Tübingen, and the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) in Berlin are participating in the four-year research programme.

Around 40 plant scientists, including PCC members, associated members and international guests are meeting at the Wissenschaftszentrum in Kiel until Thursday to present first results of the five PCC sub-projects and gain an overview of plant adaptations to changing stress factors in their habitats. The various sub-projects deal, for example, with the influence of oxygen availability on the interactions of plants with symbiotic microorganisms, the stress responses of aquatic plants to abiotic and biotic factors, and the comparison of the resilience of wild versus domesticated crops to changing environmental influences. A unique aspect of the program is the integration of five different plant species; three terrestrial plants barley, quinoa and sea-rocket, and two aquatic plants sea grass and pondweed. This provides the scientists with a unique opportunity to compare stress adaptation across different clades of plants from different environments.

"Our goal is to investigate the consequences of climate change and environmental stress on plant health, both in cultivated and wild plant species. In our various work packages, we have already been able to compile important findings on the physiological and evolutionary adaptations of plants to various stress factors, such as drought, increased temperatures and the increased occurrence of pathogens," says Professor Eva Stukenbrock, spokesperson for the PCC Research Unit, summarising the current status.

Increasing environmental stress as a result of global change

The PCC research programme aims to take a holistic view of the rapid environmental changes currently taking place and the associated range of stress factors for plants. "We are therefore trying to investigate the interactions and consequences of these various factors jointly, which we have dubbed 'co-challenges', and thus hope to find out, for example, how multiple combined stressors such as drought and the susceptibility to pathogen infestation influence each other or how these various stressors impact other factors like the plant microbiome," emphasises PCC member Dr Karin Schrieber.

The contributions of the invited experts also follow this principle: Professor Elisabeth Gross from the French Université de Lorraine reports on her work with the aquatic plant genus Myriophyllum, which she uses to study the stress responses of plants that live in water. This model makes it possible to disseminate the individual and combined effects of stress factors on the food web of plants, algae and microorganisms in freshwater habitats, thereby assessing the impacts of global change.

Dr Igor Florez Sarasa is visting Kiel from the Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics in Barcelona. His research covers metabolic responses of plants to environmental stress, for example drought stress. He integrates different types of omics data to understand the underlying mechanisms and signaling pathways whereby plants acclimatize to stress.

Dr Götz Hensel, Head of the Centre for Plant Genome Engineering at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, holds an outstanding expertise in methods of genome editing in crops using CRISPR/Cas. The goal of this kind of genome editing is to increase the tolerance of crops to combined biotic and abiotic stress factors, thereby aiming to secure agricultural yields under changing environmental conditions in the future.

Adaptation of crops to changing environmental conditions

Overall, the PCC Research Unit, which emerged from the Kiel Plant Centre (KPC), an association of plant researchers within the priority research area Kiel Life Science (KLS) at Kiel University, is working to understand the effects of increasing environmental stress on plants and the spectrum of their biotic interactions. In particular, the PCC researchers want to gain a detailed understanding of the genetic and evolutionary processes underlying plant stress adaptation. In addition to gaining new insights, the research group aims to use its findings to lay the foundations for possible future applications in agriculture. "Many of our novel insights into plant adaptation mechanisms show potential to significantly support the resilience of economically important crops to changing environmental conditions," summarises Eva Stukenbrock.