Peptide receptors for auxin canalization in Arabidopsis

Plants represent the major complex organisms on Earth and create the majority of its biomass. They ensure the life of most other organisms, most prominently animals and humans, while also having a major positive impact on the global climate. From a scientific point of view, plants are fascinating organisms as they evolved multicellularity independently of animals and thus came up with novel, original solutions for many problems that complex organism face; often very different to those evolved in animals. Thus, in many aspects, plants can be considered as extraterrestrial among us they offer biologists a model to study alternative mechanisms of how to deal with the challenges of life. This is also reflected in the life strategy of plants. Whereas animals often react to adverse conditions by fighting or running away, plants are rooted and thus must stay and adapt their physiology and development to survive. Thus, this extraordinary developmental flexibility is something which plants have in abundance. Many aspects of plant development show extraordinary self-organizing properties: formation of organs such as leaves or flowers in regular patterns, intricate leave venation, spontaneous arising and regeneration of vasculature, amongst others. These fascinating processes involve the collective coordinated behavior of many cells. For example, for the formation of vasculature, they all have to orient themselves in one (correct) direction to form unidirectional channels allowing for transport of nutrients, sugars and other substances. How can cells adjust their behavior in a collective manner? How do they know the status of neighboring cells and their position within the plant body? What are the short and long-range signals, which they exchange and how are they perceived? These are the main questions that will be addressed in this project promising to reveal mechanisms underlying plants fascinating self-organizing development. We will employ a highly interdisciplinary strategy, combining molecular physiology (hormone and peptide signalling), developmental biology (vascular tissue development), cell biology (advanced microscopy), biochemistry and molecular genetics (RNA-seq, CRISPR/Cas9) methods. It builds on a previously very successful combination of complementary expertise in hormone molecular genetics (Friml, ISTA) and self-organizing vasculature formation (Mazur, University Katowice).