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Miguel Angel Casanova, a student at the School of Agricultural Engineering of the UPCT, is the author of an end-of-grade project that analyzes how the suppression of a gene in a petunia plant alters its circadian rhythm or biological clock, so that this plant Suffers changes in flowering, odor or growth.
The final grade work lasted three years and was led by researcher Julia Weiss of the Institute of Plant Biotechnology of the UPCT.
Petunia is a plant very used in research as a model, having recently achieved the complete sequence of its genome.
The student explained that the process began with the planting of a first generation of the species, which was extracted a gene, called ZTL, through in vitro culture.
These plants were controlled at the Tomás Ferro farm to avoid contamination to other crops and, in the first generation, the changes in their vital processes could be observed.
The director of the work, Julia Weiss, is author, along with Marcos Egea, also a researcher at the Institute of Plant Biotechnology at the UPCT, a work on genetics of petunia published in May this year in the prestigious international magazine Nature Plants
The research, entitled 'Insight into the evolution of the Solanaceae from the parental genomes of Petunia hybrida', has been carried out over the past six years by an international consortium of 58 researchers from a dozen countries on several continents to develop the sequencing project Of the parents of Petunia hybrida and four commercial lines of this species.
"One of the characteristics of petunia is its survival in very different climates," adds the teacher, who along with Marcos Egea has completed the annotation of genes related to adaptation to climate change.
"These genes form the so-called circadian clock, a network that coordinates the responses of living organisms to changes in light, temperature and nutrients," says the professor at the Polytechnic School of Agronomists.
Both researchers from the Department of Agricultural Science and Technology and members of the Institute of Plant Biotechnology (IBV) are working on controlling the circadian clock of growth and emission of odor compounds, "fundamental for food quality and the way Have the plants to communicate with the rest of the world, concludes Egea.
The sequencing project has been funded by national and regional research support programs;
In the case of the UPCT, by the Seneca Foundation and the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.
Source: UPCT
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