@phdthesis{vonRueden2022,
  author    = {von R{\"u}den, Martin Frederik},
  title     = {The Venus flytrap - Role of oxylipins in trap performance of Dionaea muscipula},
  doi       = {10.25972/OPUS-27385},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-273854},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg},
  year      = {2022},
  abstract  = {A part of the plant kingdom consists of a variety of carnivorous plants. Some trap their prey using sticky leaves, others have pitfall traps where prey cannot escape once it has fallen inside. A rare trap type is the snap-trap: it appears only twice in the plant kingdom, in the genera Aldrovanda and Dionaea. Even Charles Darwin himself described Dionaea muscipula, the Venus flytrap, with the following words "This plant, commonly called Venus' fly-trap, from the rapidity and force of its movements, is one of the most wonderful in the world". For a long time now, the mechanisms of Dionaea's prey recognition, capture and utilization are of interest for scientists and have been studied intensively. Dionaea presents itself with traps wide-open, ready to catch insects upon contact. For this, the insect has to touch the trigger hairs of the opened trap twice within about 20-30 seconds. Once the prey is trapped, the trap lobes close tight, forming a hermetically sealed "green stomach". Until lately, there was only limited knowledge about the molecular and hormonal mechanisms which lead to prey capture and excretion of digestive fluids. It is known that the digestion process is very water-consuming; therefore, the interplay of digestion-inducing and digestion inhibiting substances was to be analyzed in this work, to elucidate the fine-tuning of the digestive pathway. Special attention was given to the impact of phytohormones on mRNA transcript levels of digestion-related proteins after various stimuli as well as their effect on Dionaea's physiological responses. Jasmonic acid (JA) and its isoleucine-conjugated form, JA-Ile, are an important signal in the jasmonate pathway. In the majority of non-carnivorous plants, jasmonates are critical for the defense against herbivory and pathogens. In Dionaea, this defense mechanism has been restructured towards offensive prey catching. One question in this work was how the frequency of trigger hair bendings is related to the formation of jasmonates and the induction of the digestion process. Upon contact of a prey with the trigger hairs in the inside of the trap, the trap closes and jasmonates are produced biosynthetically. JA-Ile interacts with the COI1- receptor, thereby activating the digestion pathway which leads to the secretion of digestive fluid and production of transporters needed to take up prey-derived nutrients. In this work it could be shown that the number of trigger hair bendings is positively correlated with the level and duration of transcriptional induction of several digestive enzymes/hydrolases. Abscisic acid (ABA) acts, along with many other functions, as the plant "drought stress hormone". It is synthesized either by roots as the primary sensor for water shortage or by guard cells in the leaves. ABA affects a network of several thousand genes whose regulation prepares the plant for drought and initiates protective measurements. It was known from previous work that the application of ABA for 48 hours increased the required amount of trigger hair bendings to achieve trap closure. As the digestion process is very water-intensive, the question arose how exactly the interplay between the jasmonate- and the ABA-pathway is organized, and if ABA could stop the running digestion process once it had been activated. In the present work it could be shown that the application of ABA on intact traps prior to mechanically stimulating the trigger hairs (mechanostimulation) already significantly reduced the transcription of digestive enzymes for an incubation time as short as 4 h, showing that already short-term exposure to ABA counteracts the effects of jasmonates when it comes to initiating the digestion process, but does not inhibit trap closure. Incubation for 24 and 48 hours with 100 μM active ABA had no effect on trap reopening, only very high levels of 200 μM of active ABA inhibited trap reopening but also led to tissue necrosis. As the application of ABA could reduce the transcription of digestive hydrolases, it is likely that Dionaea can stop the digestion process, if corresponding external stimuli are received. Another factor, which only emerged later, was the effect of the wounding-induced systemic jasmonate burst. As efficient as ABA was in inhibiting marker hydrolase expression after mechanostimulation in intact plants, the application of ABA on truncated traps was not able to inhibit mechanostimulation-induced marker hydrolase expression. One reason might be that the ABA-signal is perceived in the roots, and therefore truncated traps were not able to react to it. Another reason might be that the wounding desensitized the tissue for the ABAsignal. Further research is required at this point. Inhibitors of the jasmonate pathway were also used to assess their effect on the regulation of Dionaea´s hunting cycle. Coronatine-O-methyloxime proved to be a potent inhibitor of mechanostimulation-induced expression of digestive enzymes, thus confirming the key regulatory role of jasmonates for Dionaea´s prey consumption mechanism. In a parallel project, the generation of in vitro cultures from sterilized seeds and single plant parts proved successful, which may be important for stock-keeping of future transgenic lines. Protoplasts were generated from leaf blade tissue and transiently transformed, expressing the reporter protein YFP after 24 h of incubation. In the future this might be the starting point for the generation of transgenic lines or the functional testing of DNA constructs.},
  subject      = {Venusfliegenfalle},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Bemm2018,
  author    = {Bemm, Felix Mathias},
  title     = {Genetic foundation of unrivaled survival strategies - Of water bears and carnivorous plants -},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-157109},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {All living organisms leverage mechanisms and response systems to optimize reproduction, defense, survival, and competitiveness within their natural habitat. Evolutionary theories such as the universal adaptive strategy theory (UAST) developed by John Philip Grime (1979) attempt to describe how these systems are limited by the trade-off between growth, maintenance and regeneration; known as the universal three-way trade-off. Grime introduced three adaptive strategies that enable organisms to coop with either high or low intensities of stress (e.g., nutrient deficiency) and environmental disturbance (e.g., seasons). The competitor is able to outcompete other organisms by efficiently tapping available resources in environments of low intensity stress and disturbance (e.g., rapid growers). A ruderal specism is able to rapidly complete the life cycle especially during high intensity disturbance and low intensity stress (e.g., annual colonizers). The stress tolerator is able to respond to high intensity stress with physiological variability but is limited to low intensity disturbance environments. Carnivorous plants like D. muscipula and tardigrades like M. tardigradum are two extreme examples for such stress tolerators. D. muscipula traps insects in its native habitat (green swamps in North and South Carolina) with specialized leaves and thereby is able to tolerate nutrient deficient soils. M. tardigradum on the other side, is able to escape desiccation of its terrestrial habitat like mosses and lichens which are usually covered by a water film but regularly fall completely dry. The stress tolerance of the two species is the central study object of this thesis. In both cases, high througput sequencing data and methods were used to test for transcriptomic (D. muscipula) or genomic adaptations (M. tardigradum) which underly the stress tolerance. A new hardware resource including computing cluster and high availability storage system was implemented in the first months of the thesis work to effectively analyze the vast amounts of data generated for both projects. Side-by-side, the data management resource TBro [14] was established together with students to intuitively approach complex biological questions and enhance collaboration between researchers of several different disciplines. Thereafter, the unique trapping abilities of D. muscipula were studied using a whole transcriptome approach. Prey-dependent changes of the transcriptional landscape as well as individual tissue-specific aspects of the whole plant were studied. The analysis revealed that non-stimulated traps of D. muscipula exhibit the expected hallmarks of any typical leaf but operates evolutionary conserved stress-related pathways including defense-associated responses when digesting prey. An integrative approach, combining proteome and transcriptome data further enabled the detailed description of the digestive cocktail and the potential nutrient uptake machinery of the plant. The published work [25] as well as a accompanying video material (https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ 2016-05/cshl-fgr042816.php; Video credit: S{\"o}nke Scherzer) gained global press coverage and successfully underlined the advantages of D. muscipula as experimental system to understand the carnivorous syndrome. The analysis of the peculiar stress tolerance of M. tardigradum during cryptobiosis was carried out using a genomic approach. First, the genome size of M. tardigradum was estimated, the genome sequenced, assembled and annotated. The first draft of M. tardigradum and the workflow used to established its genome draft helped scrutinizing the first ever released tardigrade genome (Hypsibius dujardini) and demonstrated how (bacterial) contamination can influence whole genome analysis efforts [27]. Finally, the M. tardigradum genome was compared to two other tardigrades and all species present in the current release of the Ensembl Metazoa database. The analysis revealed that tardigrade genomes are not that different from those of other Ecdysozoa. The availability of the three genomes allowed the delineation of their phylogenetic position within the Ecdysozoa and placed them as sister taxa to the nematodes. Thereby, the comparative analysis helped to identify evolutionary trends within this metazoan lineage. Surprisingly, the analysis did not reveal general mechanisms (shared by all available tardigrade genomes) behind the arguably most peculiar feature of tardigrades; their enormous stress tolerance. The lack of molecular evidence for individual tardigrade species (e.g., gene expression data for M. tardigradum) and the non-existence of a universal experimental framework which enables hypothesis testing withing the whole phylum Tardigrada, made it nearly impossible to link footprints of genomic adaptations to the unusual physiological capabilities. Nevertheless, the (comparative) genomic framework established during this project will help to understand how evolution tinkered, rewired and modified existing molecular systems to shape the remarkable phenotypic features of tardigrades.},
  subject      = {B{\"a}rtierchen},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{BoehmScherzerKroletal.2016,
  author    = {B{\"o}hm, Jennifer and Scherzer, S{\"o}nke and Krol, Elzbieta and Kreuzer, Ines and von Meyer, Katharina and Lorey, Christian and Mueller, Thomas D. and Shabala, Lana and Monte, Isabel and Salano, Roberto and Al-Rasheid, Khaled A. S. and Rennenberg, Heinz and Shabala, Sergey and Neher, Erwin and Hedrich, Rainer},
  title     = {The Venus Flytrap Dionaea muscipula Counts Prey-Induced Action Potentials to Induce Sodium Uptake},
  series = {Current Biology},
  volume    = {26},
  journal   = {Current Biology},
  number    = {3},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.cub.2015.11.057},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-128054},
  pages     = {286-295},
  year      = {2016},
  abstract  = {Carnivorous plants, such as the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), depend on an animal diet when grown in nutrient-poor soils. When an insect visits the trap and tilts the mechanosensors on the inner surface, action potentials (APs) are fired. After a moving object elicits two APs, the trap snaps shut, encaging the victim. Panicking preys repeatedly touch the trigger hairs over the subsequent hours, leading to a hermetically closed trap, which via the gland-based endocrine system is flooded by a prey-decomposing acidic enzyme cocktail. Here, we asked the question as to how many times trigger hairs have to be stimulated (e.g., now many APs are required) for the flytrap to recognize an encaged object as potential food, thus making it worthwhile activating the glands. By applying a series of trigger-hair stimulations, we found that the touch hormone jasmonic acid (JA) signaling pathway is activated after the second stimulus, while more than three APs are required to trigger an expression of genes encoding prey-degrading hydrolases, and that this expression is proportional to the number of mechanical stimulations. A decomposing animal contains a sodium load, and we have found that these sodium ions enter the capture organ via glands. We identified a flytrap sodium channel DmHKT1 as responsible for this sodium acquisition, with the number of transcripts expressed being dependent on the number of mechano-electric stimulations. Hence, the number of APs a victim triggers while trying to break out of the trap identifies the moving prey as a struggling Na+-rich animal and nutrition for the plant.},
  subject      = {Venusfliegenfalle},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Hackl2016,
  author    = {Hackl, Thomas},
  title     = {A draft genome for the Venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula : Evaluation of assembly strategies for a complex Genome - Development of novel approaches and bioinformatics solutions},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-133149},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg},
  year      = {2016},
  abstract  = {The Venus flytrap, \textit{Dionaea muscipula}, with its carnivorous life-style and its highly specialized snap-traps has fascinated biologist since the days of Charles Darwin. The goal of the \textit{D. muscipula} genome project is to gain comprehensive insights into the genomic landscape of this remarkable plant. The genome of the diploid Venus flytrap with an estimated size between 2.6 Gbp to 3.0 Gbp is comparatively large and comprises more than 70 \% of repetitive regions. Sequencing and assembly of genomes of this scale are even with state-of-the-art technology and software challenging. Initial sequencing and assembly of the genome was performed by the BGI (Beijing Genomics Institute) in 2011 resulting in a 3.7 Gbp draft assembly. I started my work with thorough assessment of the delivered assembly and data. My analysis showed that the BGI assembly is highly fragmented and at the same time artificially inflated due to overassembly of repetitive sequences. Furthermore, it only comprises about on third of the expected genes in full-length, rendering it inadequate for downstream analysis. In the following I sought to optimize the sequencing and assembly strategy to obtain an assembly of higher completeness and contiguity by improving data quality and assembly procedure and by developing tailored bioinformatics tools. Issues with technical biases and high levels of heterogeneity in the original data set were solved by sequencing additional short read libraries from high quality non-polymorphic DNA samples. To address contiguity and heterozygosity I examined numerous alternative assembly software packages and strategies and eventually identified ALLPATHS-LG as the most suited program for assembling the data at hand. Moreover, by utilizing digital normalization to reduce repetitive reads, I was able to substantially reduce computational demands while at the same time significantly increasing contiguity of the assembly. To improve repeat resolution and scaffolding, I started to explore the novel PacBio long read sequencing technology. Raw PacBio reads exhibit high error rates of 15 \% impeding their use for assembly. To overcome this issue, I developed the PacBio hybrid correction pipeline proovread (Hackl et al., 2014). proovread uses high coverage Illumina read data in an iterative mapping-based consensus procedure to identify and remove errors present in raw PacBio reads. In terms of sensitivity and accuracy, proovread outperforms existing software. In contrast to other correction programs, which are incapable of handling data sets of the size of D. muscipula project, proovread's flexible design allows for the efficient distribution of work load on high-performance computing clusters, thus enabling the correction of the Venus flytrap PacBio data set. Next to the assembly process itself, also the assessment of the large de novo draft assemblies, particularly with respect to coverage by available sequencing data, is difficult. While typical evaluation procedures rely on computationally extensive mapping approaches, I developed and implemented a set of tools that utilize k-mer coverage and derived values to efficiently compute coverage landscapes of large-scale assemblies and in addition allow for automated visualization of the of the obtained information in comprehensive plots. Using the developed tools to analyze preliminary assemblies and by combining my findings regarding optimizations of the assembly process, I was ultimately able to generate a high quality draft assembly for D. muscipula. I further refined the assembly by removal of redundant contigs resulting from separate assembly of heterozygous regions and additional scaffolding and gapclosing using corrected PacBio data. The final draft assembly comprises 86 × 10 3 scaffolds and has a total size of 1.45 Gbp. The difference to the estimated genomes size is well explained by collapsed repeats. At the same time, the assembly exhibits high fractions full-length gene models, corroborating the interpretation that the obtained draft assembly provides a complete and comprehensive reference for further exploration of the fascinating biology of the Venus flytrap.},
  subject      = {Venusfliegenfalle},
  language  = {en}
}