April 22, 2024

Special Seminar by Prof. Jan De Vries (Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany)

Inferring the dynamic stress response networks of the earliest land plants

Plant terrestrialization marks the emergence of land plants, which dominate the terrestrial biosphere. Land plants evolved from streptophyte algae, and the earliest land plants had to overcome environmental stressors, characterized by rapid shifts in factors such as light and temperature. Recent advances have established genome data for the closest algal relatives, shedding light on shared stress response genetics. However, the action of these components remains poorly understood. By employing integrated environmental gradient and time-course stress profiling, transcriptomics, and metabolite analyses across divergent streptophytes, we uncovered networks of genes that indicate ancient signal convergence. Shared genetic hubs underscore ancient stress adaptation strategies predating land colonization by over 600 million years. I will discuss our current understanding of the evolutionary history of embryophytic stress response networks, setting the stage for plants' conquest of the terrestrial habitat.  

Jan is University Professor for Applied Bioinformatics at the University of Goettingen, Germany. He holds this position since 2022, after having been appointed Junior Professor at the same institution in 2019. Before this, he was a postdoc in the lab of John Archibald at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada, where he went on a DFG Research Fellowship. Jan’s research on the evolution of stress responses in the context of plant terrestrialization is supported by an ERC Starting Grant. For this, Jan mainly applies comparative functional genomics on streptophyte algae, focusing on their stress response. Jan did his PhD with Sven Gould and Bill Martin at the Institute of Molecular Evolution, Düsseldorf, in 2016; the topic of his dissertation was plastid evolution and symbiosis. Jan’s work has resulted in 68 publications in peer reviewed journals, 38 of which as first or last author and 26 as corresponding author.