University of Rostock (UR) is the oldest University in Northern Europe with 600-year history, it was founded already in 1419. Today, the University of Rostock offers fascinating perspectives into nearly all scientific fields organized in 9 Faculties. With the four profile lines Life, Light and Matter / Maritime Systems / Aging Science and Humanities / Knowledge – Culture – Transformation, the University of Rostock has at its disposal excellent interdisciplinary research fields in the areas of natural and technological sciences, medicine, life sciences, humanities and cultural studies. Moreover, the university is embedded into a network of associated research institutions from the Leibniz, Frauenhofer, and Max-Planck societies. Scientists of the university are involved in numerous collaborative research project funded by the EU, the German government and particularly by the DFG. Hence state of the art research and high level education are successfully connected at the University of Rostock.
- Prof. Martin Hagemann
- Dr. Eva-Maria Brouwer
UR will use the existing expertise to establish new carbon fixing pathways into the cyanobacterial host to test, if these pathways are compatible and beneficial in the photoautotrophic cell. Moreover, we will participate in the physiological and biochemical analysis of modified organisms from other groups of the consortium.
Relevant Expertise
Martin Hagemann’s team studies the stress acclimation and primary carbon metabolism in photosynthetic organisms since 30 years. We described the basic salt acclimation strategy of cyanobacteria, discovered the pathways and importance of photorespiration among cyanobacteria, and suggested the evolutionary origin of plant photorespiration from the cyanobacterial ancestor of plastids. In the moment, we are working on the acclimation of primary carbon metabolism towards fluctuating CO2 levels and are investigating new regulatory mechanisms involved in carbon allocation on different levels such as gene expression, protein translation, activity and modification. The knowledge has been used to design more stress-tolerant plants and recently cyanobacterial strains used for biofuel production. Our team collected broad knowledge on cyanobacterial and plant physiology as well as their genetic modification, which resulted in a comprehensive collection of cyanobacterial and plant mutants defective in specific genes for proteins involved in primary carbon metabolism.
