Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom - TAIR

Systems analysis of the diurnal regulation of
metabolism and growth
Plants grow continuously changing conditions. Every day they alternate between
photosynthesis in the light and respiration in the dark. Conditions also change
from day to day, and on a seasonal basis. We want to understand how plants
gauge their rate of growth to fluctuating resources. Our starting point is to ask
how they balance their carbon budget over a 24 hour cycle. Some photosynthate
is stored as starch in the light, and remobilised at night to support respiration
and growth. This process is precisely regulated, such that starch just lasts till
dawn. The rates of starch synthesis and breakdown and, by implication, the rate
of carbon use for growth are adjusted to allow this balance to be maintained
across a very wide range of photoperiods. This provides an excellent system to
understand how plants gauge allocation and growth to the carbon supply. We
have accumulated a large body of data about transcript levels, enzyme activities,
polysome loading, metabolite levels and growth rates during the perturbations of
the diurnal cycle in the reference Arabidopsis accession. These traits have also
been analysed in a set of genotypically-diverse Arabidopsis accessions, which
grow at different rates. I will discuss how we are using various sorts of models
to integrate these large and multi-level datasets.
48
L23
Friday 11:30 - 12:00
Systems Biology
Mark Stitt
Max Planck Institute of
Molecular Plant Physiology
Golm
Germany