CPSC Lecture with Associate Professor Meike Burow

Regulatory links between defense metabolism and development

A central goal of modern biology is to understand how phenotypes are regulated in response to the internal cues and the external environment. To account for the high level of complexity and interconnection in regulatory networks, models that aim at describing phenotypic plasticity need to allow for the output to modulate and stabilize the system. We have begun to test if we can utilize the glucosinolate regulatory network to discover unrecognized feedback regulation and if these compounds have the capacity to regulate processes that are typically considered upstream in the regulatory architecture.

Glucosinolates are well known as direct mediators of biotic and abiotic stress responses and recent work revealed that they feedback-regulate their own biosynthetic pathway in a structure-specific manner. The structural diversity of these chemical defenses in Arabidopsis thaliana can partially be attributed to the naturally variable genetic locus GS-AOP that encodes the enzymes AOP2 and AOP3 which differentially modify the glucosinolate structure. To identify the mechanisms that allow the plant to specifically sense glucosinolate structures, we screened for endogenous signaling properties among short-chain methionine-derived aliphatic glucosinolates by testing their ability to induce visual phenotypic responses in Arabidopsis thaliana seedlings. We identified novel signaling properties specific to individual glucosinolate structures which provide new insight into how plants optimize energy allocation.

Associate Professor Meike Burow is co-founder and board member of DynaMo Center and heads the research group for Regulatory Networks and Interactomics. Read more about her research.