Cyril Zipfel Wins ERC Grant to Decode Plant Signaling
Cyril Zipfel, University of Zurich Professor and Group Leader at The Sainsbury Laboratory, received an ERC Synergy Grant to study signal perception and responses in plants alongside three researchers working in Wageningen, Ghent and Madrid.
Plants constantly face changes from their environment, such as light, temperature and water availability, as well as the presence of pathogens. In order to survive and grow, their cells must detect these signals and respond quickly.
Scientists already understand some of these processes. “However, what happens in the first few seconds or minutes after a plant cell receives a signal remains largely unknown, mainly due to technical limitations,” explains Cyril Zipfel, Professor at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and Group Leader at The Sainsbury Laboratory, United Kingdom.
This is where the Fast & Furious project comes in. Cyril will work on the project together with Dolf Weijers from Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands; Jenny Russinova from the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology at Ghent University in Belgium; and Krzysztof Wabnik from the Polytechnic University of Madrid in Spain. The researchers have been awarded an ERC Synergy Grant worth €12.1 million, of which €2.8 million will go to Cyril's group in Zurich.
Tracking rapid changes
“The project will provide an unprecedented understanding of how plants make rapid decisions in response to multiple signals,” Cyril says. Using a newly developed method, the researchers can track rapid changes in proteins that help transmit signals inside cells.
The project has three main goals: creating a comprehensive data collection that other scientists can use, discovering new mechanisms involved in plant communication, and understanding how plant cells combine information from different sources to respond to their changing environment.
In the long term, the results could lay the foundation for developing crops with higher yields and greater resilience to environmental stress. The technical and conceptual advances made during the project will also benefit research into cell signaling in other living organisms.
This is the third time the ERC is supporting Cyril’s research; he previously received a Starting Grant in 2011 and a Consolidator Grant in 2018.
ERC Synergy Grants
The European Research Council awards ERC Synergy Grants to support collaborative projects that address challenging research questions. Applications are open to research groups of two to a maximum of four Principal Investigators (PIs), who work together and bring different skills and resources to tackle ambitious research problems.
