Kurzbeschreibung
(Englisch)
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The purpose of this research is to develop a array of complementing biosensors in the moss Physcomitrella patens that can report mild molecular changes due to exposure to various environmental stresses and/or toxic pollutants. We have developed a stress-inducible transgenic moss line that can detect milds and harsh temperature changes and micromolar amounts of organic pollutants, such as sulphonated anthraquinones. We shall further develop transgenic moss lines with different stress-inducible promoters expressing reporter genes easy to detect by automated equipment. The practical approach will be 1) to further characterize the sensitivity to various pollutants using our first stress-inducible moss line. 2) to construct other stress-inducible moss lines responding to abiotic stresses, 3) to identify by DNA micro-array pollutant specific inducible genes. 4) to construct pollutant-specific inducible moss lines. We expect to thus develop a multi-dimensional biosensor device, simple to use, which will be highly sensitive to various stress arrays. It should provide sensitive the toxicity profiles of pollutants combined to environmental cues, in plants growing in polluted environments.
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Partner und Internationale Organisationen
(Englisch)
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AT, BE, BG, CH, CY, CZ, DE, DK, EE, ES, FI, FR, GR, HU, IE, IL, IT, LT, LU, NL, NO, PL, PT, RO, SE, SI, SK, TR, UK
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Abstract
(Englisch)
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The purpose of this research was to develop an array of biosensors in the moss Physcomitrella patens that can report minor molecular changes due to exposure to various environmental stresses and/or toxic pollutants. During this research we have developed several stress-inducible transgenic moss lines that can detect milds and harsh temperature changes and micromolar amounts of organic pollutants from the wood and the pharmaceutical industries. Exploiting the fact that at 30oC recombinant luciferase is very stable in intact plants cells but very labile in dying or dead cells, we also developed a sensitive bioassay for the general toxicity of various pollutants. This permitted us to distinguish between four types of pollutants: 1) the large majority of toxic stressing (i.e. chaperone-inducing) compounds, 2) the very toxic and therefore apparently not stressing compounds, 3) non-toxic stressing compounds, 4) non-toxic inhibitors of chaperone expression. Our study, describing the general correlation between the sort-term stressing effects of various organic pollutants and their long term toxicity in the phyto-biosensor P. patens was published in Saidi et al. 2007. We than performed a screen with 2000 pollutants from the pharmaceutical industry. In general, it confirmed our initial finding that sort-term stressing effects of pullutants correlate well with long term toxicity. Yet, this screen also revealed several interesting exceptions: 1) non-toxic stressing compounds that could potencially serve as anti-protein aggregation drugs in misfolding diseases and 2) non-toxic HSR inhibitors that could potencially serve as pro-apoptotic drugs in cencenr chemotherapy. In summary, our study has produced not only an array of sensitive plant biosensors for organic pollutants in plants, but has also several important biomedical applications. Two papers are in preparatioin: 1) 'Toxicity assesment of heat-shock inducing pollutants from the pharmaceutical industry' and 2) 'A plant screen for heat-shock inducing and inhibiting drugs to control protein misfolding diseases in humans.
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