Plants transitioned onto land approximately 500 million years ago. Since their transition to land, plants have undergone enormous morphological and molecular adaptation, to fit the terrestrial environment. During their long history on land, the Earth has also experienced many changes to its climate and atmosphere, including multiple mass extinctions, suggesting that the morphological and physiological process optimizations observable in plants today must be the effect of numerous rounds of evolutionary development that have fitted to different environments existing in the Earth‘s history. Ferns were the dominant land plant some 300 million years ago, with many lineages still successful in the present. This project aims to understand their optimizations to a changing atmosphere, by growing a set of aquatic ferns in conditions which mimic the environmental conditions present at various times in Earth’s history, in particular the Mesozoic era. This project will involve establishing an effective system to grow two species of aquatic ferns in the genera Azolla and Salvinia in paleo-mimetic atmosphere, in climate chambers, and investigating their functional response to these conditions at the physiological and molecular level. Results will be compared to extant preliminary data for conifers and angiosperms.
Methods used: Growth rate determination, aqua-culture, microscopy, pigment analysis, determination of cyanobacterial symbiont level by qPCR; with possibility of expanding into global omics approaches if a longer project is designed.
Most suitable background knowledge is a combination of plant ecophysiology and molecular biology. However, it is possible to adapt the project for candidates with more or less ecology or molecular cell biology.
Length of project: Flexible, a project of 30-60 credits can be designed.
Start date: To be discussed
Supervisor(s): Allan Rasmusson, Francois du Toit, Biology, LU
Please contact allan.rasmusson@biol.lu.se or stephanus_francois.du_toit@biol.lu.se