The research will look at how plants cope with cold, heat, pests and disease A Dundee scientist has been awarded £1m to study the stresses that plants come under and how they will cope with things like climate change. Professor John Brown is investigating alternative splicing - the process by which individual genes can produce several different proteins. His research should give a clearer insight into why certain plants react better to changes in the environment. Prof Brown's laboratory is at the Scottish Crop Research Institute. 'Local conditions' Prof Brown, who is also with Dundee University, said: "It's known in plants that there are many many genes that undergo alternative splicing, which means many genes can give rise to many different proteins and under different stress conditions this alternative splicing can change. "So under cold stress or hot stress for example, or when a pathogen or pest infects the plant, these can affect the expression of genes in a plant. "So it's really about how plants deal with their external conditions because, unlike us, if it's cold they can't go inside and sit by the fire. "They have to have this flexibility where they have all their normal cellular functions even though the temperature is minus four up to plus 30." Prof Brown has attracted funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council for his work. He said: "One of the goals is to understand how plants respond to stress so that ultimately if temperatures go up people will be able to breed or generate new cultivars which will grow in different conditions. "So, things which grow well here at the moment, if temperatures go up in Scotland, may grow less well in the future and therefore you would need to have cultivars which are adapted to local conditions."



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