Co-Editor of New Phytologist
Ari Sadanandom is the Principal Investigator of the SUMO code project. Ari Sadanandom’s research group wants to understand how protein modification systems control plant growth and adaptation to their environment. Ari’s laboratory has pioneered the research on SUMO, a new protein modification system that is emerging as a pivotal molecular mechanism in stress biology in plants. AS has demonstrated that SUMOylation coordinates growth control with changing environmental conditions by directly modifying the activity of major transcriptional regulators in plants. Ari Sadanandom is also director of the Durham Centre for Crop Improvement technology, a multi-disciplinary research centre that works with Agriculture industry to develop technology that is effective in field conditions.
Ari supported the organisation of the 2023 Next generation scientists symposium.
Tuesday session 8
Deciphering the SUMO code for adaptive responses in plants.
Ari Sadanandom
Department of Biosciences, South Road, Durham University, DH1 3LE, UK
Post-translational modification (PTM) events generate proteoforms that orchestrate cell signalling in almost every biological process. The SUMOcode project aims to understand a critically important but understudied PTM in plants, SUMO (Small Ubiquitin-like Modifier). The rules governing specificity and function remain rudimentary for most PTMs, but the plant SUMO system provides a unique possibility to unravel the rules governing SUMOylation, as its core machinery comprises only 33 genes in Arabidopsis, compared with many hundreds for other PTMs.
Our central hypothesis is that SUMO specificity is conferred through how cells are primed to respond to different stress signals, the tissue and cellular spatial distribution of SUMO machinery and substrates and control of SUMOylation modification via activation, repression and competition for PTM sites.
We have developed a SUMO system cell atlas (a resource that will characterize each part of the machinery), how and in which cells and when it works, so that a map of the key events that trigger a SUMOylation response to environmental cues can be revealed.