The Quest for Identifying the Kinases Behind NRT2.1 Regulation
- Beschreibung
Why this matters?
Plants need nitrogen to grow, and when nitrate is scarce in the soil, they rely on high-affinity transporters to scavenge every last molecule. One of the key players is NRT2.1, which takes up nitrate at low external concentrations (roughly 0.2 to 1 mM). But a transporter that is always "on" would waste energy, so plants need a way to tune its activity to the current nitrogen supply.
The puzzle
NRT2.1 carries five known phosphorylation sites in its N- and C-terminal tails. Adding or removing phosphate groups at these sites acts like a molecular dimmer switch, but we still don't know which kinases flip it. Previous work has pointed to a handful of candidate kinases, and our lab is studying one of them in detail.
Your mission
Is our candidate kinase really part of the NRT2.1 regulatory machinery? You will test this using a classic and powerful biochemical approach: GFP pull-downs.
- Use GFP-coupled beads to fish out our GFP-tagged kinase from plant extracts
- Identify the proteins that come along with it (for example NRT2.1 itself and other components of the nitrate-signaling pathway)
- Use the results to confirm or rule out our kinase as a true interaction partner, helping narrow down the candidate list
Why join?
This project is a real piece of an ongoing research question. Your results will directly guide the next steps in our lab, and you will get hands-on experience with advanced techniques in molecular plant biology and beyond. No prior lab and R experience is required, only curiosity and a willingness to learn.
- Projektzeitraum
- Wintersemester 2026/2027
- Bewerbungszeitraum
- 12. bis 26.10.2026
- Durchführung
- nach Absprache
- Studienfach
- offen für alle Studienfächer
- Betreuende
- Rebecca John, Dr. Tatsiana Straub
- Institut
- Institut für Biologie (190) (Plant Systems Biology (190d))
- Sprache
- englisch
- Teilnehmendenanzahl
- min. 1, max. 2
- Arbeitsaufwand
-
ca. 30 Stunden pro Teilnehmende:r
| 1
ECTS-Punkte
Arbeitsaufwand (Stunden und ggf. ECTS) sind ungefähre Angaben. Die tatsächlich vergebenen ECTS-Punkte ergeben sich aus der tatsächlich geleisteten Arbeit.
- Für dieses Projekt ist kein Motivationsschreiben des Studierenden erforderlich
- Projektart
- experimentell
- Lernziele
-
Die Teilnehmende lernen in diesem Projekt:
What you will learn
- Growing plants in hydroponic sterile media
- Protein extraction from plant root tissue and quantification
- GFP pull-down
- Mass spectrometry
- Protein data analysis in R
- Anmerkungen für Studierende