There is no life without water, a truth applicable to all living beings. Still, some organisms possess an incredible ability to survive even after losing almost all of their cellular water. The main focus of our research is on understanding how mechanisms of seed resilience and survival in the environment, especially desiccation tolerance, evolved and are regulated at multiple levels. We use a systems level approach, combining experimental physiology, bioinformatics and molecular biology approaches and techniques. Our ambition is to advance the knowledge on seed resilience by bridging the gap between physiology and evolution of gene regulation.

Our research:

Seed maturation as a system to understand resilience to extreme abiotic stresses

During seed maturation important seed quality traits, such as desiccation tolerance, longevity, and vigor are acquired. These traits are essential for seed survival and resilience to challenging environments. In our current projects we investigate how desiccation and high temperature during seed maturation affect seed survival and overall seed quality. We combine experimental physiology and several molecular, biochemistry and omics approaches to identify the genetic and molecular regulation of resilience traits in model and crop species. Our curreny research is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO-ENW Veni 2020, NWO-TTW OTP2022-I) and the GreenTE consortium.

Evolution of plant desiccation tolerance regulation

Currently, our main focus is on plant desiccation tolerance and our main model organism are desiccation tolerant seeds (a.k.a. orthodox seeds), and we focus on the maturation phase of seed development to identify the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) responsible for desiccation tolerance acquisition. By combining seeds and resurrection plants ‘omics’ information, we hope to understand how the GRNs of desiccation tolerance evolve in the plant lineage. With the knowledge gained from our research we are contributing with practical applications, with a special focus on improvement of seed treatments (such as priming), seed storage and overall seed quality.

Fine drying: Seed preparation for the dry state

Desiccation tolerance is acquired during the maturation phase of seed development, before actual seed drying. In our NWO-ENW-Veni project we investigate what are the possible regulatory roles of drying on gene expression, mRNA translation and stability and protein structure and function involved in desiccation tolerance acquisition during seed maturation.

With the support of the GreenTE consortium we are now diving into the mechanisms of mechanosensing underlying desiccation tolerance acquistion during seed maturation and loss during seed germination. For this, we combine biophysics and bichemistry approaches with transcriptome and phosphoproteome analyses.

Website: https://www.mariana-artur.com