Re-Leaf TERMINATED

Project "Re-Leaf" data sheet

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 Project objective

Food security is one of the biggest challenges of our century. Climate change and an increasing human population call for crop plants that are resistant to abiotic stresses, such as heat and drought while maintaining high productivity and nutritional values. This will require rational strategies for metabolic engineering of crop plants. Fundamental to this engineering challenge is the modelling of leaf metabolism. Leaves are the main site of photosynthesis and therefore the interface where carbon from the environment is assimilated to synthesise and maintain cellular components. Plants have developed different mechanisms to fix carbon: C3, C4, and Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM). While C3 photosynthesis is the most widespread form, the latter two exhibit higher efficiency at higher temperatures or drought, respectively. Current large-scale metabolic models lack a mathematical description of processes on the interface between the environment and the leaf. To address this problem, I intend to devise a computational approach that couples genome-scale metabolic modeling to the environment by explicitly modeling gas-water exchange. These multi-layer models will help address fundamental questions about the operation of C4 photosynthesis and CAM. The workplan comprises two research objectives: 1) Coupling CO2- water gas exchange models with multi-timestep diel models: The CO2-water exchange models will allow changing environmental conditions during the diel cycle (e.g., temperature and humidity cycles) to be coupled to the behavior of the metabolic models. These environment-coupled models will be used to address the second research objective: 2) Model-driven studies of C4 and CAM metabolism: The extended diel models will be used to investigate metabolic engineering strategies for improved productivity under high temperatures (e.g., by introducing C4) and to understand the trade-off between productivity and water-use efficiency in both C3 and CAM plants.