Dr. Antoni Garcia Molina
Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG), Barcelona
“ Systems Biology approaches to investigate plant responses to stress“
Abstract
Plants under natural environment are continuously threaten by adverse conditions that limit fitness and yield, a scenario that will be aggravated due to the climate change. In this scenario, understanding how plants deal with stressors as under natural environments is of pivotal interest to design biotechnological strategies to achieve resilience and ultimately ensure food security. Unfortunately, most of the knowledge we have about responses to stress has been generate under single design and not under combinations of stress, as occurs in nature. In addition, the large interplay among biological components prevents us from deciphering a complete picture of homeostatic responses. Plant Systems Biology has emerged as a new branch in Plant Science that pretends the integration of large datasets to elaborate holistic interpretations of biological processes. In this presentation I will go through two examples of systemic approaches aimed at elucidating new features participating in response to stress. In the first case, I will show how different levels of complexity in gene regulatory networks (GRNs) can be reconstructed in tomato plants exposed to conditions mimicking the environment at the end of the century. In the second example, I will explain how we can take advantage of large collection of transcriptome profiles available at the literature to train models that anticipate whether Arabidopsis plants suffer stress or not.
Short Bio
Antoni Garcia-Molina studied Biochemistry and Biology at the University of València. He also completed there his PhD investigating members of the family of Cu transporters in Arabidopsis. Later, he moved to Germany for almost 10 years to do a series of three post-docs, namely the Max Plack Institute in Cologne and the Technical and Ludwig-Maximilians Universities in Munich. As a result , Antoni has specialised himself as plant systems biologist with a special interest on plant responses to stress. In September 2021 he was incorporated at CRAG (Barcelona) as Marie Curie fellow and from January 2024 he was recruited as Junior Group Leader in the frame of the Ramón y Cajal programme.
If anyone is interested in meeting with the speaker, please contact Nuria Andrés (nuanco@btc.upv.es).