Ralph S. Quatrano
Investigator Contact Information:
Washington University
Department of Biology
Spencer T. Olin Professor and Chairman
Campus Box 1137
One Brookings Drive
Saint Louis, Mo 63130
rsq@wustl.edu
(314)935-6850
Project Participate:
Abha Khandelwal - Postdoctoral Fellow
Quatrano Research
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An organism is an open system, which senses its surroundings and signals.
Plants are sessile, oxygenic photosynthetic organisms that
face changes in environmental conditions such as light intensity, water,
nutrient supply and temperature. The imbalance in any of these
environmental parameters drastically effect plant metabolic and
developmental processes. The equilibrium between oxidized and reduced
substrates determines the redox state of a cell. Plant cells execute
several redox reactions (reduction/oxidation) to generate or utilize
energy (photosynthesis and respiration). It is well established that redox
regulation plays a central role in adjusting plant metabolism and
development to changing environmental conditions [1]. To understand the
mechanisms underlying this regulation, we will focus our study on a
vascular plant Arabidopsis thaliana, whose complete genome sequence is
available and a non-vascular plant moss, Physcomitrella patens.
Simultaneous efforts are aimed at delineating redox control network (RCN)
in Synechocystis, photosynthetic bacterium. In order to delineate RCN in
Arabidopsis, we need to establish a reporter system, which will reflect
the changes in the redox status of the cell. Initially, we will use
fluorescent dyes that respond to changing redox status and perform mRNA
analysis to identify genes that can serve as markers for changes in redox
status of the cell. Reporter genes like luciferase or GFP under the
promoters of such markers (redox sensors) and loss or gain of function
mutants will be utilized to perform to identify and validate the
mechanisms of redox homeostasis among diverse photosynthetic organisms
across evolutionary tree.
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