Project Leader Peter Bozhkov

Expertise: We explore molecular mechanisms and implications of autophagy for plant biology and develop autophagy-related tools for improving agronomically-important traits.

Major achievements within C4F

i)  Establishment of ATG5 and ATG7 as rate limiting components modulating autophagic flux at the transcriptional level

ii)  Demonstration that stimulation of autophagy in Arabidopsis through constitutive overexpression of ATG5 or ATG7 enhances several fitness-related traits, such as vegetative growth, seed set, and resistance to oxidative stress and necrotrophic pathogens.

iii) Establishment of the first pipeline for high-throughput screening of plant autophagy-modulating chemical compounds.

Selected publications on the topic

Dauphinee AN, Cardoso C, Dalman K, Ohlsson JA, Berglund Fick S, Robert S, Hicks GR, Bozhkov PV, Minina EA. (2019) Robust chemical screen pipeline for the identification of specific plant autophagy modulators. Plant Physiol. accepted as “Breakthrough Technology”

Elander PH, Minina EA, Bozhkov PV. (2018) Autophagy in turnover of lipid stores: trans-kingdom
comparison. J. Exp. Bot. 69, 1301-1311.

Minina EA, Moschou PN, Vetukuri RR, Sanchez-Vera V, Cardoso C, Liu Q, Elander PH, Dalman K, Beganovic M, Yilmaz JL, Marmon S, Shabala L, Suarez MF, Ljung K, Novák O, Shabala S, Stymne S, Hofius D, Bozhkov PV. (2018) Transcriptional stimulation of rate-limiting components of the autophagic pathway improves plant fitness. J. Exp. Bot. 69, 1415-1432.

Bozhkov PV (2018) Plant autophagy: mechanisms and functions. J. Exp. Bot. 69, 1281-1285.

Üstün S, Hafrén A, Liu Q, Marshall RS, Minina EA, Bozhkov PV, Vierstra RD, Hofius D (2018) Bacteria exploit autophagy for proteasome degradation and enhanced virulence in plants. Plant Cell 30, 668-685

Minina EA, Moschou PN, and Bozhkov PV (2017) Limited and digestive proteolysis: crosstalk between evolutionary conserved pathways​. New Phytologist 215, 958–964.