NoStressWall

Drought stress impacts negatively on plant growth and product quality and this situation will become worse because of global climatic change. It is therefore important to improve not only our understanding of strategies used by plants to adapt to this stress, but also to learn more about its impact on different plant products. A major transformable plant product is the plant cell wall composed of cellulose, hemicelluloses and, in certain tissues, lignin. This resource (lignocellulosics) is transformed into biofuels and is used in bio-based materials. In this project, we aim to produce comprehensive data via multi-scale –omics analyses on the impact of drought stress – with a major focus on the cell wall - in two plant species (flax and Brachypodium). We have chosen these 2 species because we wish to evaluate the impact of drought stress directly on two major types of valorisable cell wall structure: flax for the use of their long cellulose fibres in composite materials and textiles and Brachypodium as a model bio-fuel species system. The NoStressWall project aims to: i) generate and integrate large amounts of transcriptome, metabolome and proteome data together with comprehensive analyses of cell wall structure and modifications induced by drought stress, ii) use a reverse genetics screen to identify specific mutants in available flax and Brachypodium chemical mutant populations, and iii) initiate preliminary functional characterization of selected mutants. One of the must important final products of this project will be the construction of the up-datable NoStressWall database including information on the multi-omics and cell wall analyses as well as the results of functional analyses of flax and Brachypodium mutants. A parallel monitoring of these data by different systems biology approaches will be performed in order to learn more about biologically relevant events during drought stress in both analysed species. The information will also inform us about the physiology of stress responses and adaptation strategies in higher plants. The identification and functional characterization of drought-stress genes in flax and Brachypodium, together with the wide range of genetic resources/tools that are available from other projects, will accelerate plant breeding programs and allow the development of other strategies such as whole genome and targeted association mapping approaches. The proposed project is essentially fundamental but as drought stress impacts directly on flax fiber quality and Brachypodium biomass production, our results on these species will therefore be of direct interest to breeders, farmers and end-users of fibers (composite materials, textiles) and biomass.