Angewandte Bioinformatik

Together, we will explore the deep evolution of pathways that are and were key to the stress response of land plants.

Our team is supported by funding through a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, an ERC Consolidator Grant under Horizon Europe, and the DFG.

Good news: Jan has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant

The ERC has decided to support our project "Conserved Environmental Programs of Streptophyte Cells – StreptoProgram" with nearly two million euros. For the next five years, we will investigate how the fundamental toolkit evolved that land plants use to dominate our landscapes today. The project will bring together genetic experiments with large-scale measurements of cellular activity over time, including protein regulation and gene expression. Using network analyses to integrate these datasets, our team will identify key genetic “hubs” that are shared across this ancient lineage — and determine where evolution introduced new connections.

News: Göttingen University to coordinate next stage of DFG Priority Programme MAdLand

In 2019, the Senate of the German Research Foundation (DFG) established the priority program "MAdLand – Molecular Adaptation to Land: Plant Development in Transition" (SPP 2237). The program is designed for a duration of six years. One of the most remarkable challenges that plants have mastered is the transition from water to land (plant terrestrialization), which occurred about 500 million years ago. This change in habitat necessarily required molecular adaptations to cope with a range of new stressors. The terrestrialization of plants also caused a dramatic transformation through the alteration of the Earth's atmosphere and land cover, preparing the Earth for the life we know today. The MAdLand community makes significant contributions to publicly accessible data resources for the (evolutionary) biology of plants, has expanded the list of organism systems available for research, and thus created resources for the entire research community. While the overall framework of research questions will continue to be addressed in the second funding period, comparative approaches that consider multiple models have become more feasible and are therefore being promoted. To coordinate these efforts, an annual meeting is held.