Abstract:  

Plants are constantly challenged by a variety of biotic and abiotic stressors in their natural environments. Due to their sessile form of life, higher plants have evolved an enormous regulatory flexibility to cope with adverse environmental conditions, such as drought, heat and pathogen infection, by substantial changes in primary and secondary metabolism. One key target of the metabolic responses is the partitioning of assimilates between the photoautotrophic source tissues and the heterotrophic sink tissues. The disaccharide sucrose and the cleavage products glucose and fructose are the central molecules for carbohydrate translocation, metabolism and sensing in higher plants. It has become evident through a combination of functional approaches with transgenics, biochemistry, instrumental analytics, genetics, high-troughput enzymology and non-invasive phenotyping that the invertases and other key enzymes of primary carbohydrate metabolism are involved in various aspects of growth and development throughout of the plant life cycle and the response to abiotic stress and pathogen infection. The external information of the multifactorial environment is only integrated at the level of physiology into appropriate responses, which ultimately determines the phenotypic plasticity of an organism within the Genotype x Environment interaction, whereas the sum of the resulting complex interplay of metabolic pathways and regulatory networks is reflected in an internal phenotype. Thus it will be important for practical applications to link the genotyping and external phenotyping to the underlying physiological processes and regulatory mechanisms. This requires the adaptation of available and development of new and complementary non-invasive and invasive methods for precise and high-throughput analyses of physiological processes and parameters at different scales.

Kindly invited!