Short description
Autophagy is the major catabolic process of eukaryotes allowing cells to recycle their own contents. It is intensively investigated by plant biologists to elucidate mechanisms regulating plant fitness and stress tolerance. Development of precise molecular tools to study plant autophagy is a difficult but an extremely important task.

In this project you will help to further characterize our recently discovered chemical compounds that can modulate plant autophagy (Dauphinee et al.,2019). 


Project goals:

1. Quantification of successive changes in autophagy activity during the drug treatment using advanced fluorescent microscopy and biochemistry methods using our designated high-througput assay.

2. High-throughput phenotyping of plant seedlings using our new robotic system SPIRO

3. Optimization of the drug concentration and treatment duration for minimizing possible side effects

 You will acquire skills in:

1. Advanced fluorescent microscopy 

2. Handling typical plant model organism Arabidopsis thaliana 

3. Advanced DNA and protein molecular biology methods 

4. Acquiring and handling high-throughput data (using ImageJ macros and Raspberry Pi-based robot)