International team led by Dolf Weijers (WUR) receives ERC Synergy Grant of 12.1 million euros

An international team led by Wageningen University & Research (WUR) has been awarded an ERC Synergy Grant of 12.1 million euros. Over the next six years, the team will investigate how plants convert external stimuli into specific cellular responses. The researchers will focus on the first minute of signal processing in plant cells, a phase that has been largely unexplored so far.

Plants constantly respond to stimuli around them such as heat, light, hormones, nutrients and pathogens. Yet scientists know very little about exactly what happens inside a cell after it receives a signal. Dolf Weijers, Professor of Biochemistry at Wageningen University & Research (WUR), will investigate these early communication processes with colleagues from Ghent Jenny Russinova, Cyril Zipfel, Zurich and Krzysztof Wabnik, Madrid. The researchers aim to identify which receptors in the cell detect the signals and which biochemical processes follow (source).