MSCA Fellow in the field of plant – environment interactions
- Your supervisor for your research through training project will be Maruša Pompe Novak, and here is link to her references;
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4176-849X
The topic of the research work of the Postdoctoral Fellow will be on plant – environment interactions, as the Postdoctoral Fellow will join to a team of scientists with a long term research goal to answer the question, which genes, proteins and signal molecules are of key importance for the resistance of agronomically important plants to the infection with pathogen microorganisms such as viruses and phytoplasmas, and to abiotic stresses such as drought and salinity with the analysis of sensitive and resistant varieties and of genetically modified plants. This topic is of high importance, especially as climate change is threatening the sustainability of agriculture, due to the recurrent drought events during the summer. Moreover, climate change is also influencing the availability of water resources, therefore the need for irrigation is increasing. Consequently, drought and salinity stress are becoming very important issues, as irrigation water may contain elevated salt concentrations. Moreover, climate change is also affecting plant – pathogen interactions as the outcome of the interaction depends on genotypes of both, host plant and pathogen and can vary with various environmental conditions and various developmental and physiological growth stages of a plant.
The research topic will be addressed using up-to-date cutting-edge methods and research equipment for bioimaging techniques (e.g. plant phenotyping, light, confocal and electron microscopy…), molecular biology (e.g. NGS, qPCR, ddPCR, CrisprCas…) and bioinformatics (including several licences and pipelines). The research work will be performed in completely new fully equipped labs, including plant growing facilities (e.g. research quarantine greenhouse and growth chambers for plants in soil and in tissue cultures).
