Plant autophagy for sustainable agriculture

Improving sustainability of agriculture is one of the most important and challenging tasks facing humanity.

Growing population of the planet puts an increasing demand on the food supply, while changing climate decreases productivity of traditional crops.

Development of robust, high-yield crops tailored for the changing conditions is of the utmost importance.Our recent findings indicate that manipulation of plant major catabolic process, autophagy, enhances important agricultural traits, e.g. seed yield, plant biomass, oil production. Autophagic activity is highly responsive to environmental changes.

Thus, we need a thorough understanding of molecular mechanism regulating autophagic activity to make efficient transition of promising results obtained in controlled laboratory environment into the field trials. Plant autophagy is executed by autophagy related ATG proteins that are regulated on posttranslational level.

Our understanding of plant ATG proteins modifications is still fragmented.

Since this knowledge is crucial for understanding mechanisms impacting autophagic activity in plants, I will (i) perform high-throughput analysis of posttranslational modifications of plant ATG proteins, (ii) verify their importance for plant autophagy, (iii) identify factors introducing the modifications.

Furthermore, I plan to build on my ongoing collaboration with SweTree Technologies and Syngenta to verify obtained results on crop species.