Cereal Biotechnology

In the AG ‘Cereal Biotechnology’ we aim to develop and establish tools enhancing the biotechnological use of cereals. Therefore, we are working, among other things, on the advancement of maize transformation protocols, on the construction of improved binary plasmids using the Gateway®-system as well as on the identification of new tissue specific promoters and the demonstration of their usefulness in biotechnological applications. We are using methods comprising plant cell tissue culture, recombinant DNA cloning methods, transcriptome analysis, expression and enzyme activity analysis as well as plant transformation (biolistic, Agrobacterium-mediated).

Biomass and Bioenergy Production

Biomass is already the biggest contributor to renewable energy production, even if its potential has not been fully exploited yet. There is still a huge research demand in order to improve features of bioenergy plants. Increasing biomass yield per acreage, altering biomass composition to ease its conversion into biofuels as well as the double usage of crop plants producing food and bioenergy open up huge research areas.

In this group we generally want to study the physiology of the crop species maize. The aim of our research here is to understand the physiology of biomass production in maize as this will raise the chance to successfully engineer maize into a better bioenergy crop. We also want to illuminate the sink-source relationship in maize and the allocation of carbohydrates between different plant organs. With this we want to learn to modify the sink strength of particular plant organs, so biomass can be redirected and accumulated to higher amounts.

We also want to elucidate which factors govern the ability of crop plants to build up biomass. In the frame of the ‘BioEnergie 2021’-initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) (Link: http://www.bmbf.de/de/12075.php) we are taking part in the project ‘OPTIMAS - Systems Biology of Maize Plants (Link: http://www.optimas-bioenergy.org/)’. The project follows a systems biological approach. It integrates physiological, biochemical and molecular data with agronomically relevant parameters in order to identify metabolic processes and genes, which correlate positively with a high biomass production. In this project the focus lies on the impact of water-use efficiency and of the reaction towards different day lengths on maize biomass production.

In order to achieve our goals we are using a wide range of techniques including standard molecular and biochemical methods, leaf gas exchange measurements, transcriptome and expression analysis, the production of recombinant proteins in bacteria, yeast and plants, plant transformation (stable/transient; Agrobacterium-mediated/biolistic), overexpression and RNAi/amiRNA-mediated down-regulation of genes, plant cell culture as well as immunological methods.