Plant development and environment

Course goals

Learning goals
In this course, we will move beyond textbook knowledge to recent scientific developments on the topic of plant development in their changing environment. You will learn how plant development is regulated and how the incredible flexibility of their development is used by plants to adjust to their highly dynamic environment. You will learn to understand at several levels of organisation how signalling molecules, genes and physiology are interconnected to control developmental plasticity to survive threatening environmental conditions. Two factors of the environment, salinity and flooding, will be the main case studies during this course.
This course will prepare you both practically and theoretically for scientific research in the domain of plant science. In the lectures, wet labs and data labs you will learn first-hand how scientific knowledge is generated. The lectures are based on material from (recent) research articles to illuminate how experimental data becomes scientific knowledge, and to show you the edge of knowledge in the field. In the wet labs and data labs you will be interactively involved in the scientific process. This includes practicing how to define research questions and hypotheses, how to design and perform experiments, how to collect and analyse data, and how to interpret results in the biological context. In the wet labs you will learn how to carry out experiments with plants, such as treating plants with different light and water regimes, measuring phenotypic traits, and assessing molecular level changes to protein and mRNA. In the data labs you will learn how to analyse large gene expression datasets using online databases to gain biological insight on how roots and shoot respond to changes in their environment.

At the end of the course you should be able to:

• Evaluate primary articles and experimental data to draw conclusions,
• Design, plan, perform and analyse scientific experiments,
• Describe how plants develop and how development is regulated,
• Describe the characteristics of different environmental stresses,
• Describe mechanisms of developmental adjustments to environmental stress,
• Explain how external stress stimuli are translated at a cellular level into an adjustment of the plant developmental program,
• Explain variation between plants for developmental plasticity to stress. In other words, understand why some species are able to adjust and others are not.

Skills

• Analysing scientific literature,
• Analysing a complex biological phenomenon using scientific literature,
• Planning and time management,
• Going through the cycle of scientific research,
• Analysing, interpreting and discussing scientific data,
• Formulating a research question,
• Reporting plans and results orally and in writing.

 

Skills	Part of the course?	Explicitely examined?
Writing	X
Presenting	X	X
Data handling	X	X
Practical research skills	X	X
General research skills	X	X
Co-operation	X	X
Critical thinking	X	X
Career orientation	X
Interdisciplinarity

 

Content

Entry requirements
Plants and micro-organisms (niveau 1) and Plant Physiology and Development (niveau 2) are required. Molecular Genetic Research Techniques (B-B2MGOT14) and Plants in Context (B-B2PICO21) are recommended.

Study path
Plant Biology

Language
The course is taught entirely in English.

Content
Plants are continuously challenged by sometimes life-threatening changes in their environment. These can severely impact their development and even kill plants. Interestingly, plants can flexibly adjust their development to deal with these environmental changes. They can for example adjust root anatomy to resist drought, overall root architecture to forage for nutrients, and shoot architecture to escape from shade or submergence. In order to ascertain optimal development, plants have evolved a broad variety of mechanisms of developmental plasticity.
In this course we discuss the following aspects:

• How do plants control their development?
• How do plants sense the environmental cues flooding and salinity?
• How does environmental signalling control plant development?

You will be learning to combine knowledge from molecular genetics, physiology, and functional genomics to understand plant organismal development and the interaction with the environment. This course combines lectures with hands-on practice in wet lab practicals and data labs.

Work formats
Lectures, wet lab practicals, data lab practicals, presentations: oral, poster

Grading
To pass this course, a minimum of 5,5 is mandatory. Your grade is calculated by the following components:

• Test 1:          25%
• Test 2:          25%
• Wet lab:        25%
• Data lab:       25%

Active participation in practicals and presentation-associated assignments is mandatory. The minimal score for each component is 5.5.

Study material
Mandatory:

• Laptop computer. Literature as provided to you during the course