The group has been awarded a Gravitation subsidy of 22.8 million euros for this purpose. Prof. dr. ir. Gijs Wuite from the Physics of Living Systems group is one of the main co-applicants in this interdisciplinary consortium which is led by Prof. Dolf Weijers and Prof. Joris Sprakel of the Laboratory of Biochemistry of Wageningen University & Research.
“It has been known for more than 100 years that plants have a sense of touch,” says Professor of Mechanobiology Joris Sprakel, “They sense touch or wind, they register when a fungus tries to penetrate. Grass, for example, senses whether you are walking on it and this then leads to all kinds of processes in the plant that lead to more strength. But how exactly does that work? That really is still a blind spot in our knowledge.”
“That is the first major challenge in this program,” adds Professor of Biochemistry Dolf Weijers. “If we better understand how a plant perceives mold ingress, we may also be able to help them become more resilient. That's the second challenge. Using the mechanical defence of plants is a keg that is not being tapped at all in all attempts to make plants more resistant to diseases. This could therefore give a boost to the development of food crops that are more resistant to plant diseases.”
At the Physics of Living Systems group, Gijs Wuite has been working on technologies to measure forces experienced by biological systems. The research questions put forward in this gravitation project are the next frontier because plants are very tough and the forces experienced plant cells are much higher than in animal cells. New technologies thus have to be developed. “I see this as a great opportunity to expand the reach of our science and bring our tools to plant science. So far this has not been done and we are in the unique position to do so”, Gijs Wuite says.
This also fits with the Green TE consortium which is composed of a wide range of scientific expertise's. The complex biological questions that we want to answer cannot be done without knowledge of physics, chemistry, scientific modelling, and biology. This is knowledge that is not represented in a single institution, but in which the Netherlands as a whole excels. The consortium consists of scientist from the universities of Wageningen, Utrecht, Nijmegen, Eindhoven, Groningen, Leiden en Amsterdam (VU) that will work together in an interdisciplinary manner on new knowledge
About Gravitation
With Gravitation, the government encourages excellent research in the Netherlands. The programme is for scientific consortia that have the potential to rank among the world's best in their field. The programme is a form of direct government research funding. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science has asked NWO to realise a selection procedure for Gravitation.