Dr Darius Kosmützky

Microbial interactions have significantly influenced plant diversity, and both beneficial and detrimental interactions continue to be crucial in agriculture. The complexity of these interactions fascinates me, and I am excited about the impact of this research area.

Using Marchantia polymorpha as a model system provides an evolutionary perspective to this research. Marchantia’s phylogenetic position relative to well-established flowering plant models and crop species allows us to interrogate processes conserved since their last common ancestor over 400 million years ago.

Plant-microbe interactions affect both the host and its symbiont in numerous ways, and the plant developmental mechanisms controlling these interactions must therefore also be manifold. For example, past publications from the Schornack Group highlighted how transcription factors involved in infection response can impact various aspects of plant biology, from cell wall modification to reproductive processes.

For my PhD I was investigating the enigmatic protein cytochrome c6A, which is found in every green plant and algae and has high homology to the electron transport protein cytochrome c6 of the photosynthetic electron transfer chain. At the time we knew that c6A could not do what c6 does. I was using a mixture of techniques from biophysics, biochemistry, and molecular biology to find an answer to the questions why c6A exists and what it does. For this I was mainly working with the unicellular eukaryotic alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. This basic research gave us more insight into photosynthetic processes of plants and algae and the associated adaptation mechanism to various stresses.