Research group Heyl
Research interest
The plant hormone cytokinin plays an important role in many physiological and developmental processes as well as the reaction of plants to abiotic and biotic stress. The cytokinin signal perception and transduction is mediated by a multi-step phospho-relay system, a variation of the classical two-component signaling pathway found in bacteria.
In the current model of this signaling pathway, the binding of cytokinin to the ligand binding domain, the so-called CHASE domain, causes the cytokinin receptor histidine kinase (HK) to auto-phosphorylate itself at a conserved histidine residue. Subsequently this signal is transferred within the receptor protein to a canonical aspartate residue of a C-terminal response regulator domain. Afterwards, the phosphoryl signal is transferred to a histidine phospho-transfer protein (HPt), which can translocate to the nucleus, where it activates the type-B response regulators (type-B RRs) by phosphorylation of the response regulator domain. These Myb- transcription factors activate the transcription of their target genes, one group of which are the type-A RRs (Heyl et al., 2006). These regulate in a negative feedback loop the activity of cytokinin signaling and represent an internode, linking the cytokinin signaling pathway with other cellular signaling pathways (Dortay et al., 2008 ).
We are interested in various aspects of the cytokinin signal transduction:
Group members
- Dr. Alexander Heyl, group leader
- Jacobo Martinez Font, postdoc
- Andreas Pfeifer, Ph.D. student
- Eva Hellmann, Ph.D. student
- Nijuscha Gruhn, Ph.D. student
- Mhyeddeen Halawa, Ph.D. student
- Cordula Braatz, technical assistant