New approaches to study plant tolerance to challenging climate change: effects of drought stress on the photosynthetic membrane

Scholarships for International students, PhD students, University teachers, researchers and artists granted by the Slovak Academic Information Agency (SAIA). Subject: Under drought stress, the concomitant regulation of excitation and electron pressure, which involves interplay between PSI, PSII and antennae, remains obscure in many aspects. We need a deeper understanding of the effect of drought stress on thylakoid membrane functioning, taking into account the most recent achievements about photosystem photoprotection. The use of novel model plants for drought stress analysis may have a predictive value about phenotypic traits that could be relevant to counteract the stress and improve tolerance also in crops. An ideal model test, complementary to traditional crop models, would be a plant species in which a high susceptibility to drought is associated with a wide dynamic range of response to light. The evolutionary history of plants on Earth suggests that potential candidates could be representatives of lycophytes, ancestral vascular plants mostly living in humid shady habitats, but still able to respond and acclimate effectively to light conditions within nearly two orders of magnitude of irradiance.