To explore the mysteries of plant adaptation to environmental stress

Which gene expression and cell activity of the innovative research group causes plants to be particularly sensitive or insensitive to environmental stress (such as drought, high salt, lack of nutrition, etc.)? How do living cells respond appropriately to environmental stress in order to survive? Although plants are "fixed", they can "make efforts" to adapt themselves to the environment through self-regulation when they are confronted with drought, high salt, lack of nutrition and other adversity stresses To explore the mechanism of plant adaptation to environmental stress from the aspects of gene, physiological and biochemical response and cell activity is the work of the innovative research group of "mechanism of signal transduction and gene expression regulation of plant response to environmental stress" of China Agricultural University Wu Weihua, a group academic leader and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that the serious shortage of fresh water, land and other resources in crop production in China has seriously restricted the sustainable development of agriculture in China, while more and more problems such as large-scale salinization, desertification and shortage of fresh water resources in cultivated land are increasing, which makes the environmental stress in crop production more serious At the same time, due to the lack of P and K mineral resources in China, a huge amount of P and K fertilizer is imported every year The insufficient application of P and K fertilizer in crop production seriously limits the increase of crop yield, and also causes the low utilization rate and waste of nitrogen fertilizer and the resulting environmental pollution In a word, abiotic environmental stresses such as drought, salt and alkali, phosphorus and potassium deficiency have become important factors restricting the sustainable development of agriculture in China At the same time, the physiological, biochemical and molecular genetic mechanisms of plant response and adaptation to abiotic stress in the past half century have shown that plant stress tolerance is controlled by genetic genes Therefore, the cultivation of new varieties of crop stress resistance suitable for cultivation in arid, saline alkali, poor soil and other areas will not only effectively increase the yield of crops in China, but also greatly alleviate the lack of land resources in China through the effective use of arid, desertification and some salinized land Therefore, it is one of the major needs of agricultural sustainable development in China to carry out the basic physiological and molecular biology research of plant stress resistance and high efficiency The State Key Laboratory of plant physiology and biochemistry of China Agricultural University was established in 2002 Many achievements have been made in plant physiology research On this basis, the innovative research group of "mechanism of signal transduction and gene expression regulation of plant response to environmental stress" was funded by NSFC in 2005 The research contents include the molecular mechanism of cell signal transduction of plant response to environmental stress, the mechanism of gene expression and transcription regulation of plant response to environmental stress, and the cloning of plant resistance / high efficiency related genes And functional research In the past six years, this population has been involved in the molecular regulatory network of plant response to low potassium stress, the molecular regulatory mechanism of plant cell potassium channel, the molecular mechanism of plant hormone ABA signal transduction, the functional analysis of plant cell calcium dependent protein kinase (CDPKs), the functional analysis of cytoskeleton and new plant microtubule binding protein, and the functional analysis of gene transcription regulatory molecular mechanism (ROS and WRKY) ）Important progress has been made in many areas Since 1996, the team has started the screening of plant P-K efficient and salt tolerant mutants For each character, hundreds of thousands of seedling culture, observation of the experimental work is extremely difficult In 2006, they finally found an important mechanism to regulate the potassium nutrition of plants Then, important results were obtained in the study of plant phosphorus efficiency In this study, they demonstrated that the activity of AKT1 in root cells of Arabidopsis thaliana was positively regulated by cipk23, while the upstream of cipk23 was positively regulated by CBL1 and cbl9, two calcium signal receptors In Arabidopsis, overexpression of cipk23, CBL1 or cbl9 gene to enhance AKT1 activity can significantly improve the tolerance of Arabidopsis to low potassium stress Based on the research results, they proposed a theoretical model of potassium uptake molecular regulation in response to low potassium stress, including CBL1 / 9, cipk23 and AKT1 The research results have theoretical and scientific significance in understanding the molecular regulation mechanism of plant potassium absorption and utilization, and may also have potential application value in improving plant potassium nutrition by using molecular operation technology In the study of plant gene transcription regulation, the group obtained many inhibitors of ros1 gene and cloned many related genes These proteins related to DNA replication can interact with multiple proteins related to gene silencing, which indicates that DNA replication is accompanied by replication of epigenetic modifications, thus ensuring the stability of genetic information in cells and the dynamic changes of epigenetic modifications In addition, they have made important progress in the study of the expression mechanism of WRKY transcription factor regulating PHO1 gene and the regulation of Arabidopsis floral organ abscission by transcription factor In the field of cloning and functional analysis of new stress-related genes, team members established a set of screening system for drought-related mutants, screened and obtained a number of mutants related to plant drought resistance, and studied two of them in detail, revealing their important role and molecular mechanism in response to drought stress.