Strawberry and tomato are two of the most important fruit crops in Denmark. To obtain high yields, a significant amount of sugars (mainly sucrose) needs to be transferred from leaves to fruits to provide them with carbon skeletons and energy for growth and development. However, these two crops follow different routes when moving sugars from photosynthetic cells into the long-distance transport tissue, the phloem. Tomato follows an apoplastic route where photosynthates are loaded into the phloem through transport proteins, while strawberry a symplastic route where sugars move towards the phloem via narrow channels, called plasmodesmata. Recent evidence suggests that the mode of phloem loading plays an important role in controlling physiological adaptation of plants to the light environment, but the mechanisms underpinning this adaptive response remain elusive.
The project aims to identify the key physiological and molecular components of fruit crop adaptation to light. The student will have the opportunity to get training in a range of physiological, analytical and molecular methods, such as gas exchange analysis (photosynthesis), high performance anion exchange chromatography (HPAEC), quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR), microscopy and spectrophotometry. It is envisaged that this work will be published in an international peer-reviewed journal.
