How Plants Cope With Iron Deficiency

Research groups from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and the University of Münster (WWU) have discovered a new switch that plants use to control their responses to iron deficiency. The findings from their research on the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana is published in the journal Developmental Cell. Because plants are sessile, they cannot escape their respective situation. Consequently, they have evolved strategies to recognise changing environmental conditions at an early stage and to adapt to these changes. Particularly in view of climate change, understanding the processes that plants use to adjust to variations in food supply when environmental factors become unpredictable is also of major importance to the agricultural sector and its collaborating research partners in their endeavours to breed new varieties of high-yield crop plants. Iron regulation is an important model system in plant biology for understanding how cellular regulation processes impact on each other and the related signalling paths. Researchers at HHU under the leadership of Prof. Petra Bauer and her associate Dr. Tzvetina Brumbarova and at WWU under the leadership of Prof. Jörg Kudla and Prof. Uwe Karst have examined the special mechanisms and dynamics of a protein named "FIT" in iron uptake and have discovered cellular information processes that impact on FIT.