DynaMo Mini Symposium: Approaches to elucidate transport mechanisms in current plant biology
DynaMo is happy to invite to a Mini Symposium on diverse approaches to elucidate transport mechanisms in plants with no less than three speakers. The symposium including questions from the audience will take two hours.
The speakers
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Dietmar GeigerProfessor Julius-von-Sachs-Institut für Biowissenschaften University of Würzburg |
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Ingo DreyerProfessor Centre for Plant Biotechnology and Genomics Technical University of Madrid |
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Osman Asghar MirzaAssociate Professor Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology University of Copenhagen |
Abstracts
Dietmar Geiger
Unraveling the transport mechanism of plant sucrose transporters
The majority of higher plants use sucrose as their main mobile carbohydrate. Proton-driven sucrose transporter play a crucial role in cell-to-cell and long-distance distribution of sucrose throughout the plant. Here electrophysiological and biophysical methods to elucidate the transport mechanism and structural features of the maize sucrose carrier ZmSUT1 are presented.
Ingo Dreyer
Molecular Evolution of Plant Ion Channels
Taking advantage from more than 30 available plant genomes, phylogenomic analyses provided new insights into the molecular evolution of anion and potassium channels. The combination of sequence alignment and clustering with predictions of position-specific protein features resulted in the identification of evolutionary highly conserved properties. The results suggest that cross-referencing phylogenetic analyses with position-specific protein properties and functional data could be a very powerful tool not only for ion channels but for genome research approaches in general.
Osman Asghar Mirza
What goes in and what comes out of the plant POT
In most organisms Proton coupled oligopeptides transporters (POTs) facilitate the transport of di- and tripeptides. In plants however, the POTs (or NPFs) have evolved to cover a much larger substrate space involving solutes that seem to be chemically unrelated. We are investigating whether it is possible to rationalise the substrate specificity in terms of phylogenetically and structurally conserved residues. The talk will summarise the current state of the project.