ERC Consolidator Grant · 2022
Revealing the ancient plant ethylene biosynthesis and ACC signaling pathway
When ancestral plants colonized the land 450 million years ago, they needed to adapt to harsh environmental conditions when giving up their aquatic lifestyle. I hypothesize that during this water-to-land transition, the volatile plant hormone ethylene became an important growth regulator to face terrestrial stressors. In fact, modern-day crops use ethylene to regulate stress responses, and perhaps ethylene served this role in pioneering land plants to cope with the harsh conditions coinciding with this habitat transition. During my postdoc, I showed that ethylene signaling was functionally assembled in ancestral Charophyte green algae, prior to land colonization. Now I question why and how…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.