Angewandte Bioinformatik
New Group picture!
Together, we will explore the deep evolution of pathways that are and were key to the stress response of land plants.
Our team is supported by funding through European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme as well as the DFG.
News: Göttingen University to coordinate next stage of DFG Priority Programme MAdLand
In 2019, the Senate of the German Research Foundation (DFG) established the priority program "MAdLand – Molecular Adaptation to Land: Plant Development in Transition" (SPP 2237). The program is designed for a duration of six years. One of the most remarkable challenges that plants have mastered is the transition from water to land (plant terrestrialization), which occurred about 500 million years ago. This change in habitat necessarily required molecular adaptations to cope with a range of new stressors. The terrestrialization of plants also caused a dramatic transformation through the alteration of the Earth's atmosphere and land cover, preparing the Earth for the life we know today. The MAdLand community makes significant contributions to publicly accessible data resources for the (evolutionary) biology of plants, has expanded the list of organism systems available for research, and thus created resources for the entire research community. While the overall framework of research questions will continue to be addressed in the second funding period, comparative approaches that consider multiple models have become more feasible and are therefore being promoted. To coordinate these efforts, an annual meeting is held.
Good news: Jan has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant
The ERC has decided to support our project "TerreStriAL" with 1.49 million euros. For the next five years, we will work on a comparative approach to infer the molecular toolkit that the earliest land plants have likely put to use in responding to terrestrial stressors. In this interdisciplinary research, we will generate multi-omics data on the closest algal relatives of land plants, the streptophyte algae, and compare these with data on land plants. Altogether, we will shed light on the evolution of key stress response mechanisms and pathways across more than 600 million years of streptophyte evolution.