Browsing by Author "Hadid, Feras"

The growing demand for crop products caused by population growth and climate change encourages plant scientists to investigate sustainable strategies to tackle such problems. Translating the knowledge of plant molecular mechanisms into applicable practices in the field would help in improving the plants' efficiency and productivity. The size of a plant's shoot apical meristem (SAM) is an important factor in biomass production and crop productivity. Besides, understanding the molecular regulation of the shoot apical meristem would help to know more about the 3D growth innovations of different plant families across the kingdom. This thesis aimed to study the regulation mechanisms of the meristem activity in Gerbera, the model organism of the Asteraceae family that has an informative phylogenetic position to understand evolutionary events. The inflorescence of Gerbera is highly resembling clv3 mutants in Arabidopsis. CLV3 peptide is involved in maintaining the meristem activity, these differences between the two species suggested an evolutionary modification for this pathway. GhCLV3-GhWUS signaling components in Gerbera hybrida were identified following bioinformatics approaches. Then sequence comparisons and phylogenetic analyses between Gerbera sequences and other species were performed. The coding sequence of GhCLV1 was cloned to expression vectors. The expression pattern analysis of the receptors was performed by RT-PCR and RNA-seq data. The results suggest that GhCLV1 is an important factor in maintaining the enlarged inflorescence meristem in Gerbera. Also, all the other receptors were expressed at different levels suggesting their contribution in the GhCLV3-GhWUS pathway and inflorescence termination.