Tong has now started his change of scientific environment in Kiel

Tong has now started his change of scientific environment in Kiel

The sad passing of Prof Margret Sauter was announced to the scientific community in early January, but we decided to carry on with the planned work in her laboratory in Kiel. In this way, we honour her scientific legacy, since the work on adventitious root formation as a response to flooding of deepwater rice was initiated by her.

The current work is a collaboration with Dan Liu (a PhD student of Margret) and Chen Lin who is now back in Yangzhou University. We recently published a paper in New Phytologist, where we systematically evaluated the growth and anatomical features of two types of aquatic adventitious roots formed as a response to flooding. We proposed that the leaf sheath protects AR2 (a type of adventitious roots that have to penetrate the leaf sheath) from hypoxia via the extensive aerenchyma present in the leaf sheath. In contrast, AR1 (that emerge directly from the node at a point just below the attachment of the leaf sheath) can experience hypoxia when submerged in murky floodwater.

Tong and Dan have 2 weeks to work extensively on oxygen supply to the nodal tissue of NIL-12, which is a near-isogenic line of paddy rice (cultivar T65) introgressed with a QTL from deepwater rice (C9285). This line was produced by Motoyuki Ashikari and Keisuke Nagai at Nagoya University and has been an important model plant in the work of Margret and Chen.



Tong in Kieljpg
Tong is about to conduct the first measurements of oxygen status in the primordia of the two types of aquatic adventitious roots that NIL-12 form as a response to submergence.