DynaMo Seminar: Ingo Dreyer

DynaMo Center of Excelence hosts a seminar on 13 May 2013. Everybody is welcome.

Ingo Dreyer

Plant Biophysics, Centro de Biotecnología y Genómica de Plantas, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Long distance K⁺ transport - a mobile source of information and energy in plant vascular tissues

Potassium (K⁺) is an important nutrient for plants and is recognized as a limiting factor for crop yield and quality. It serves as a cofactor of various enzymes and as the major inorganic solute maintaining plant cell turgor. K⁺ also plays an important role in numerous metabolic processes, for example, by serving as an essential cofactor of enzymes. Interdisciplinary research in the past years bridging biophysics and plant physiology helped identifying additional roles of K⁺ in plant growth. K⁺ ions circulating in vascular tissues serve as a source of information on the growth status of the shoot and transmit it to the roots. Structure-function studies clarified the mechanism how specialized K⁺ channels in xylem parenchyma cells read out this information and react flexibly with xylem K⁺ loading on the shoot’s demand for K⁺.

Additionally, by a systems biology approach combining diverse biophysical and plant physiology experimental approaches with computational cell simulation, it was shown that K⁺ circulating in the phloem serves as a decentralized energy storage that can be used to overcome local energy limitations. Unique posttranslational modification of the Arabidopsis K⁺ channel AKT2 taps this potassium battery, which then efficiently assists the plasma membrane H⁺-ATPase in energizing the transmembrane phloem (re)loading processes under energy-limiting conditions. Interestingly from an evolutionary point of view, the occurrence of those specialized plant K⁺ channels involved in information processing and energy supply coincides in plant history with the appearance of vascular plants.

Ingo Dreyer did his PhD in Biophysics and Botany at the University of Würzburg under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Rainer Hedrich. During 1998-2001 he was Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at INRA Montpellier, France and since 2001 he has been associated with the University of Potsdam, where he in 2007 became Leader of the Independent Group BioPhysics and Molecular Plant Biology. Since 2011 he is also Professor at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, where he is Leader of the group “Plant Biophysics” at the Centro de Biotecnología y Genómica de Plantas (CBGP).