Browsing by Subject "barley"

Drought events will increase in the future due to climate change and thereby threaten agricultural production. The growing world population needs stable yields nonetheless thus, solutions need to be found. One way to do so is to explore mechanisms that allow plants to withstand harsh conditions and recover from them. Autophagy is such a mechanism. It is a bulk degradation pathwaythat allows plants to recycle cell components. During biotic and abiotic stress autophagy pathways are enhanced. Even though this mechanism is very useful and is proven to enhance abiotic stress tolerance, very little is known about it in plants. This thesis aimed at defining the informative time points for drought and autophagy response during drought and recovery in barley. To do so barley plants were subjected to gradual drought by withholding irrigation. They were kept at a level of severe drought for 4 days and were then rewatered. The tip of the third leaf was sampled for RNA extraction followed by qPCR. The genes this thesis focused on were GST and HSP17 as indicators of drought stress and ATG6 as indicator for autophagy. Additionally, phenotypic data was collected via RGB imaging for monitoring wilting and thermal imaging for stomata closure. GST was upregulated during the onset of drought, which seems to make it an early response gene, while HSP17 was upregulated during severe drought. ATG6 had a high transcription rate during all stages of drought and only decreased during recovery. However, because the primer efficiencies calculated in this experiment appear to be very low, and data points were missing due to pipetting practice, the results are not reliable and need to be repeated. Thus, no prediction about the informative time points can be made. The thermal data showed good results and the expected pattern of stomatal closing during drought could be observed. But because the greenhouse is a variable environment a reference would make the data even more precise.