Investigating calcium signalling in Marchantia polymorpha: A study of CBLs and CIPKs.

Houghton, James (2024) Investigating calcium signalling in Marchantia polymorpha: A study of CBLs and CIPKs. Masters thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Global food security is one of the preeminent challenges facing the modern world as a rising population demands an ever increasing volume of food to feed it. However, simultaneously climate change through both drought and other extreme weather events is proceeding to destroy arable land, leaving less and less viable farming space every year. In order to help combat this, generations of more hardy crop plants could be generated to use this otherwise unusable land. But in order to do this we need to understand better just how plants respond to the stresses currently rendering the land useless.

Calcium is a ubiquitous secondary messenger in plants which is involved in a variety of stress responses including physical, biotic and abiotic stresses by creating calcium signals. Plants decode these signals through a suite of decoder proteins, however years of evolution and hybridisation events have left the genome of crop plants highly convoluted and difficult to decipher. However, Marchantia polymorpha is one of the earliest diverging land plants, with a much reduced set of decoder proteins, making it an excellent tool for studying both how these stress responses evolved, and how the systems themselves operate.

This work investigates a particular subset of these decoder proteins, Calcineurin B-Like proteins (CBLs) and their interacting partners, CBL-Interacting Protein Kinases (CIPKs). When compared to the tradition plant model organism Arabidopsis thaliana I have shown that both CIPKs of M. polymorpha bind CBLs non-specifically, binding to all three native CBLs as well as AtCBL4 from Arabidopsis thaliana. This total promiscuity is not shared by AtCIPK24, failing to bind CBL-C from M. polymorpha. Additionally, work has begun on identifying the stresses that CIPKs are responsible for, a phenotyping experiment utilising cipk-B KO mutants showing that CIPK-B is necessary for salt tolerance in M. polymorpha.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	13 Nov 2024 10:22
Last Modified:	13 Nov 2024 10:22
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/97675
DOI:

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