Title: “How distress signals affect growth in plants and biotechnology for health and energy production”

Plant development and stress responses are regulated by complex signalling networks that mediate specific and dynamic plant responses upon activation by various types of signals. Jasmonates (JAs) mediate responses to stress and act like growth inhibitors. The latest work has identified new regulatory nodes in the transcriptional network that regulates diverse plant responses to developmental and environmental cues. In my laboratory, we are interested in discovering the cellular components linking plant stress responses to growth processes with the aim to improve yield and adaptation of plants to their environment. We also exploit the ability of JAs to induce protective specialized metabolites to develop novel functional screenings to improve the understanding of key pathways leading to the production of economically important compounds. A second research line is aimed at tailoring the composition of cell wall polymers to improve processing of biomass and the improvement of key traits for the production of biomass and biofuels in microbes and plants is achieved by affecting the composition of plant cell wall polymers. A review of the state of the art and the latest results will be presented