Desiccation Tolerance & Seed Maturation
Water is essential for life, but remarkably some organisms have the capacity to survive extreme loss of water from their cells, a trait called Desiccation Tolerance. This ability allows seeds to survive drying during development and storage and enables some plants to withstand severe water limitation.
Understanding How Plants Survive Extreme Water Loss
Our group studies principles that enable cellular desiccation tolerance, using seed maturation as our primary experimental system. By connecting evolution, development, environmental signaling, gene regulation mechanisms our research aims to advance fundamental understanding of how cells function and survive during drying, and to translate this knowledge to improve seed quality, conservation and crop resilience water-limited environments.
Research questions
• How has desiccation tolerance evolved across the plant phylogeny?
• How is desiccation tolerance regulated at the transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels?
• How do plant cells sense drying and reorganize their cytoplasm to survive extreme water loss?
Seed Maturation As A System To Understand And Improve Resilience To Extreme Abiotic Stresses
Desiccation tolerance is acquired during seed maturation, alongside other important traits such as chlorophyll degradation and seed coat impermeability, which contribute to seed longevity and vigor. This makes seed maturation a powerful biological system for uncovering how seeds acquire resilience traits with implications for seed conservation and quality improvement.
Research questions:
• How do environmental cues, such as drying and high temperature, shape seed maturation and survival?
• How are seed quality traits, such as chlorophyll degradation and seed coat permeability, regulated during seed maturation?
• Can we harness seed maturation pathways to improve seed quality and resilience?
From Fundamental Mechanisms To Resilient Seeds
Our model plants for experimental physiology, molecular biology and comparative ‘omics’ spans Arabidopsis, desiccation-tolerant extremophytes and crop species.
For more information visit: https://www.mariana-artur.com/
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https://www.wur.nl/en/persons/dr-ma-mariana-silva-artur
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Research themes
Plant Physiology
Plant Physiology, led by Christa Testerink, aims to contribute to the understanding of how plants function.
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