Cereal DELLA proteins and their importance in abiotic stress tolerance: A translational study
Margaret Boulton
John Innes Centre, Norwich Research Park, Colney, Norwich NR4 7UH. UK
Government funded institutes are increasingly required to exploit fundamental discoveries made in model systems to enhance the strategic relevance of their research.
The John Innes Centre has established several research “clusters” to facilitate this translation. As co-ordinator of the abiotic stress cluster I will briefly outline the translational pipelines and provide an example of a translational study based on the negative regulators of plant growth, the DELLA proteins, which are conserved in land plants. Mutations in the wheat DELLA ( Reduced height, Rht ) are agronomically important, leading to the semi-dwarf wheats which were integral to the increased yields of the Green Revolution. I will discuss the functional equivalence of the Arabidopsis
DELLAs and their cereal orthologues, Rht and SLN1 (barley) . I will present results obtained using mutants and near isogenic lines (NILs) to assess the role of cereal
DELLAs in tolerance of long term and transient abiotic stress, and discuss the effect of polyploidy on the stress responses.