MENTOR – Molecular Mechanisms to Improve Plant Resilience

An increasing demand for plant-derived resources in view of yield losses due to global climate change and loss of arable land makes maintaining crop yield one of the highest priorities in agriculture. The molecular understanding of plant acclimation to stress is a key to future improvement strategies. The MENTOR program teaches the necessary expertise as a blend of different skills, ranging from technique application and data analysis to knowledge transfer from basic to applied plant science. Modifications of proteins after their synthesis, so-called post-translational modifications (PTMs), are at the basis of plant acclimation and present key targets for increasing stress resilience. MENTOR will study how PTMs such as phosphorylation or SUMOylation affect the activity and function of target proteins, and how they interact in the context of stress acclimation in subcellular pathways and physiological responses. The overreaching theme is the elucidation of molecular mechanisms of stress acclimation, their importance in crops, and resilience testing under near-field conditions. MENTOR covers current technologies in plant physiology ranging from biochemistry and cell biology to state-of-the-art phenotyping. Furthermore, proteomic and transcriptomic analyses combined with network analysis and modelling will guide MENTOR students through the discovery of regulatory principles of stress response. This will be done in the common model plant Arabidopsis as well as six crops. MENTOR will be the first program in Austria dedicated to molecular plant sciences, bringing together scientists with complementary expertise in distinct aspects of adaptation. With joint supervision, the participating students will form a strong, interactive cohort and become familiar with a broad range of approaches and models, enabling them to address biological questions in plant sciences that are of high scientific and social relevance.