US-Germany Cooperative Research: Identification and Analysis of CBL1 Calcium Sensor/CIPK1 Target Proteins

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

0233146 Luan This award supports the PI and two postdoctoral students from the University of California, Berkeley in a collaboration with Jorg Kudla of the Department of Molecular Botany at the University of Ulm, Germany. The research will focus on understanding the signaling pathways that link environmental stress factors to cellular responses in higher plants. These responses are an evolutionary development that allow plants to "monitor" potentially harmful stress conditions and then change their physiological and developmental programs accordingly. The PI's recent studies have identified a new family of doubly ionized Calcium sensor proteins that play a role in plant response to stress signals. One member of that family is probably instrumental in the plant response under study. The combined effort of the US and German groups is indispensable to raising the level of research to a new height. The collaboration will also allow for international training of the two US postdoctoral students involved in the research.