A versatile biosensor of strigolactone responses in plants

Strigolactones (SLs) are a class of plant hormones that participate in many plant environmental interactions, including responses to drought.

Much still has to be understood about how they mediate plant responses to abiotic stresses, but their mapping and quantification in plant tissues is extremely difficult.

Some SL biosensors have been developed in recent years, but they all suffer from some technical limitations: namely they are negative sensors whose signal is degraded in the presence of SLs, and they require laborious and invasive techniques for signal detection.

The aim of this fellowship is thus to combine knowledge in the fields of plant synthetic biology and plant molecular physiology to construct a novel SL biosensor, called StrigoSense, which is positively activated in the presence of SLs.

StrigoSense will be constructed using the principles of modularity and reusability: this will allow to pair it with many customisable reporter systems, creating a tool which can accomodate a variety of users and research applications.

In this project, StrigoSense is coupled to fluorescent and bioluminescent reporters for the non-invasive monitoring of plant SL responses at the cell and system level.

The biosensor will be developed in Arabidopsis and tomato plants, seeking to transfer the research conducted on model organisms to a crop of enormous relevance, narrowing the gap between basic research and the development of SL-based agricultural solutions.

After fine-tuning, the biosensor will be used to monitor plant responses to different abiotic stresses and to an array of SL-like compounds and biostimulants with the potential of acting as priming agents that help plants cope with recurring water deficits. This will be the first example of the testing of a SL biosensor under physiological stress conditions.

The technical advantages of StrigoSense will make SL biosensors faster, cheaper and more high-throughput, with benefits for basic and applied research.