Session Chair
Being sessile organisms, it is helpful for plants to both know what and how many other plants are growing next to them, and if their neighbors are being attacked by insects or pathogens or abiotic stressors, so they can make appropriate changes to their physiology and development. This session will highlight some of the exotic ways plants recognize and respond to their neighbors, and to show how these signaling systems might be leveraged to improve crop yields.
Featured talks
The world is full of sound. It was a mystery whether plants communicate with other organisms through sound. In recent years, the idea has flourished that plants emit and perceive sound and could even be capable of exchanging information through the acoustic channel. I will give some such examples and perspectives on plant acoustic communications.
Distinguished Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Purdue Center for Plant Biology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.
Plants are constantly exposed to volatile organic compounds released into their environment by other plants, insects and microbes. They possess the ability to perceive, differentiate and respond to specific volatile cues. This presentation will cover the different aspects of volatile-mediated communication from perception of volatiles to the signaling pathway(s) involved.
Presentation Description: Competition for a pool of limited resources is assumed to be the primary driver of plant competition. Within agriculture, how is it possible that crop yields can be reduced by early exposure to neighbouring weed seedlings when resources are plentiful? Can plant communication via light quality signals be the answer?
LIPME, Université de Toulouse, INRAE, CNRS, 31326 Castanet-Tolosan, France & Department of Molecular Biology, Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen
Our understanding of the genetic and molecular mechanisms underlying natural variation in plant–plant interactions remains limited. By integrating approaches from community ecology, quantitative genetics, and molecular biology, I will present the identification and functional characterization of adaptive loci in Arabidopsis thaliana that mediate ecologically relevant plant–plant interactions.
Plant immune signalling is regulated by multiple protein kinases that phosphorylate target proteins to regulate their activity, localization, and binding partners. In this talk I will present some of our recent work aimed at understanding phosphorylation-mediated signal transduction mechanisms.
