Speaker:
Prof. Felix Willmut (University of Marburg)
Title:
"Heat stress in plants - response at the cellular level and adaptation to high temperatures"
Abstract:
Climate change is increasingly leading to more extreme weather conditions and poses major challenges to biological systems, resulting in massive stress. Due to their sessile lifestyle, plants had to develop molecular strategies to maintain physiological functions under stress. The increasingly extreme weather conditions of climate change often overwhelm these stress adaptation mechanisms, leading to crop yield losses, forest dieback and significant changes in ecosystems. In my research group, we are investigating the molecular effects of heat stress and which biochemical mechanisms enable adaptation to heat conditions. In my talk, I will describe how heat leads to strong aggregation and misfolding of proteins and how the cell deals with this. In recent years, we have succeeded in isolating and identifying these denatured proteins from algal cells. Furthermore, we carried out intensive microscopic studies to show how these proteins aggregate and how aggregates are disposed of after stress. We hope that our results will provide a basis for the future development of more stress-tolerant metabolic pathways in plant cells.
