Dynamo Seminar: Daniel Marino

DynaMo Semiars are a series of public seminars hosted by DynaMo Center. We are pleased to invite you to our next seminar.

Daniel Marino

University of the Basque Country
Spain

Towards the identification of metabolic and genetic factors involved in plants ammonium nutrition

Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA), a concept introduced by the FAO, is a strategy with the aim of ensuring food security in a changing climate. Among others, CSA involves sustainably increasing agriculture productivity while reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). The intensive use of nitrogen (N) fertilizers is responsible of some of the detrimental effects that agriculture has on the environment such as nitrate leaching and GHG emissions, mainly N2O.

One of the strategies that has been demonstrated effective to mitigate the negative environmental impact of N fertilization is the use of ammonium-based fertilizers combined with nitrification inhibitors. However, high contents of ammonium in the soil may entail the appearance of toxicity symptoms such as chlorosis or growth impairment. Although great progress has been done in understanding how plants deal with ammonium stress, the metabolic adaptation of plants is not completely understood and still very few molecular components related with plants ammonium tolerance have been identified.

In this context, our general objective is to gain knowledge on plants response to ammonium nutrition by the use of omic approaches, the study of natural variation and by better understanding plant metabolism. Among others, I will present you the link that we found between plants response to ammonium stress and glucosinolate metabolism.

Daniel Marino is Ikerbasque Research Associate at the Plant Biology and Ecology Department, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, University of the Basque Country, Spain. Daniel Marino obtained a PhD degree in Biological Sciences with European Mention in 2006 from the Public University of Navarra, Spain. He has been employed at the Public University of Navarra, Pamplona, Span; Agrigenomics Research Centre, Barcelona, Spain; Sophia Agrobiotech Institute, INRA-CNRS, Sophia-Antipolis, France; and Laboratory of Plant-Microbe Interactions, INRA-CNRS, Toulouse, France before coming to the University of the Basque Country. His areas of research are plant nutrition and metabolism, plant molecular biology and plant-microbe interactions.