POTEND Stress

Drastic temperature fluctuations, drought and flooding, aggressive chemicals, predators, or diseases, against all kinds of stress a plant must defend itself without the possibility to escape. In the course of their evolution, plants have developed successful strategies that are encoded in their genes and genetic interaction. Until a few years ago, it was believed that plants manage to maintain their well- being on their own. It has recently become known that plants, just like humans, are colonized by a wide variety of microorganisms that make important contributions to health and productivity. To conserve genetic diversity for breeding varieties that are better adapted to biotic and abiotic stresses, certain crops such as the potato must be preserved clonally. This is done either by field maintenance, in vitro storage, or cryopreservation. To successfully cryopreserve plants, they must be subjected to a procedure involving abiotic stress factors such as mechanical wounding, drought and cold. However, not only abiotic stress factors affect the success of cryopreservation, but also biotic factors such as microorganisms. The presence of bacteria during cryopreservation has often been considered as contamination. These microorganisms are transmitted from generation to generation and can influence growth positively or negatively. It has been shown that after thawing and revitalization, some regenerated plants are spontaneously and undesirably overgrown by their own microbes and die, while other cryopreserved samples grow particularly vigorously and regenerate into strong intact potato plants. It is suspected that certain microbes play a role in this process. The project investigates the microbiome of 384 different cryopreserved potato shoot tips with the aim of correlating the identified microorganisms with the plants ability to regenerate after cryopreservation. Microorganisms will be isolated from selected in vitro plants in a further step. The interaction between microorganism and in vitro plant will be studied at the gene level to better understand the positive and negative influence of certain microorganisms. Furthermore, selected microorganisms will be investigated for colonization within the potato in vitro plants. The results from the collaboration of IPK Gatersleben and the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology will o contribute to improve cryopreservation in potato gene banks. Furthermore, the results will also provide important insights for other, more general areas of crop stress tolerance, which can contribute to the improvement of sustainable integrated pest management in agriculture and be useful for the development of novel, microbe-based cultivation methods.