Plants have developed various cellular, physiological and morphological solutions to deal with changing environmental conditions. To tightly control gas and water vapor exchange between the plant body and the environment, pores bordered by two guard cells on the epidermis of aboveground plant organs, called stomata, fine-tune the exchange rate by well-regulated stomatal opening and closing to facilitate physiological processes such as photosynthesis and transpiration. 

Stomatal opening under high temperatures is controlled by the OST1-regulated TOT3-AHA1 module.

Xu X, Liu H, Praat M, Pizzio GA, Jiang Z, Driever SM, Wang R, Van De Cotte B, Villers SLY, Gevaert K, Leonhardt N, Nelissen H, Kinoshita T, Vanneste S, Rodriguez PL, van Zanten M, Vu LD, De Smet I.

Nat Plants. 2024 Nov 29. doi: 10.1038/s41477-024-01859-w. Online ahead of print.

 #ArtGenetics

Our fruits, vegetables, and cereal crops stem from a wild ancestor and have undergone major changes through millennia of domestication and selection. There are various ways to reveal plant diversity over time, and one of these is through the combination of art history and genetics (also known as #ArtGenetics).

We apply a gel-free phosphoproteomics pipeline to different biological systems: wheat and soybean organs, Arabidopsis cell suspension cultures, and Arabidopsis seedlings. We combine these systems with loss- and gain-of-function approaches (such as tightly controlled systems using a constitutively active form under a native, inducible promoter), engineered kinases, and specific stimuli to perform an untargeted mass spectrometric analysis of the phosphoproteome.

While the knowledge on post-translational regulation through transient phosphorylation in plants is growing because of its crucial importance in plant molecular networks, it remains an underexplored and challenging area.
In Arabidopsis and major crop species, phosphorylation is controlled by a large number of protein kinases and phosphatase complexes. However, for the majority of cytoplasmic kinases, membrane-associated receptor kinases and phosphatases unravelling physiological and developmental roles and identifying substrates remain a challenge.

Almost every organism is exposed to variation in temperature, on a daily and on a seasonal basis. This is especially true for plants that, as sessile organisms, need to continuously alter their growth, development, and physiology in response to temperature variation. To sense and respond to temperature changes, several molecular sensors and downstream signalling and response networks have evolved.