The seminars take place on the Montpellier Institut Agro/INRAE Campus of La Gaillarde (2, place P. Viala Montpellier)

Monday, June 12 2023

Amphi 206

Marc Knight

(Department of Biosciences, Durham University, UK)

Calcium signalling in response to stress in plants

Abiotic and biotic environmental stimuli are sensed and transduced by signalling networks in plants leading to an appropriate pattern of protective gene expression.  My lab is interested in how calcium, involved in response to so many different primary signals, can encode specific information to elicit the correct downstream responses.  The calcium signature hypothesis states that different external stimuli elicit unique spatiotemporal patterns of elevations in cellular calcium concentration and thus encode stimulus-specific information that is “read” by plant cells. Through a combination of experimental and mathematical approaches, we have determined how calcium signatures are “decoded” by specific transcription factors to lead to appropriate specific gene expression responses. Our most recent work has found that unique calcium signatures occur when different stresses are applied simultaneously or sequentially, or when a single stress is applied under different environmental conditions. These signatures represent integrated information obtained from different environmental cues together, and are decoded to produce unique gene expression “decisions”.

Contact: Christophe Maurel

Contacts IBIP :

Sabine Zimmermann (sabine.zimmermann@cnrs.fr)

Alexandre Martiniere (alexandre.martiniere@cnrs.fr)

Aude Coupel-Ledru (aude.coupel-ledru@inrae.fr)

Chantal Baracco (chantal.baracco@inrae.fr)