This research exchange programme focuses on plant reproduction. The world population depends for its nutrition on agricultural crop products, mainly as seeds and fruits. Improvements of crop plants to achieve better yields under suboptimal growth conditions will be essential to keep up with the increase in world population and to reduce the impact of high yield farming on the environment. Most agricultural products, such as seeds and fruits, are derived from the reproductive process of flowering plants. Therefore, crop improvement requires a detailed understanding of flower and fruit development. Research on reference species, such as Antirrhinum, Arabidopsis and rice have revealed interconnected regulatory networks based primarily on transcription factors that guide the patterning and growth of flowers and fruits. We will focus on a fundamental, economically important and experimentally tractable biological system, plant reproduction, and we will take advantage of genomic and post-genomic tools to analyse the regulatory network controlling reproductive process. To obtain maximum benefit from a broad comparative analysis, we will focus on a key set of genetic interactions that clearly regulate flower development and cell fate in the reference species. However using a comparative approach, we aim to understand how evolutionary variation led to differences and/or similarities in reproductive processes in (crop) species. Detailed analysis of the network of regulatory genes controlling reproductive development in Arabidopsis represents the biological theme around which our training programme is built. The exchange of researchers between Italy, Spain, Mexico and Brazil will allow an intense collaboration between the research groups that will lead to the transfer of knowledge between the different laboratories...
This research exchange programme focuses on plant reproduction. The world population depends for its nutrition on agricultural crop products, mainly as seeds and fruits. Improvements of crop plants to achieve better yields under suboptimal growth conditions will be essential to keep up with the increase in world population and to reduce the impact of high yield farming on the environment. Most agricultural products, such as seeds and fruits, are derived from the reproductive process of flowering plants. Therefore, crop improvement requires a detailed understanding of flower and fruit development. Research on reference species, such as Antirrhinum, Arabidopsis and rice have revealed interconnected regulatory networks based primarily on transcription factors that guide the patterning and growth of flowers and fruits. We will focus on a fundamental, economically important and experimentally tractable biological system, plant reproduction, and we will take advantage of genomic and post-genomic tools to analyse the regulatory network controlling reproductive process. To obtain maximum benefit from a broad comparative analysis, we will focus on a key set of genetic interactions that clearly regulate flower development and cell fate in the reference species. However using a comparative approach, we aim to understand how evolutionary variation led to differences and/or similarities in reproductive processes in (crop) species. Detailed analysis of the network of regulatory genes controlling reproductive development in Arabidopsis represents the biological theme around which our training programme is built. The exchange of researchers between Italy, Spain, Mexico and Brazil will allow an intense collaboration between the research groups that will lead to the transfer of knowledge between the different laboratories...