4D Life Sciences Seminar

Franziska Fichtner is a plant biochemist at the Institute of Plant Biochemistry at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and a member of the Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences (CEPLAS). Her research focuses on how plants link their metabolic state to their growth and development. Her group addresses a fundamental question in plant biology: how does a plant sense the sugar it has available and translate this information into decisions about when to grow, branch, and flower? To answer this question, she studies trehalose 6-phosphate (Tre6P), a sugar-signalling molecule often described as the plant’s 'insulin', and investigates how it interacts with plant hormones to coordinate metabolism with development. By combining molecular genetics, biochemistry, and metabolite analysis, her research provides a framework for understanding how plants integrate metabolic and hormonal signals to shape their architecture, and how this knowledge could help improve plant growth and resource use.

In her talk 'Trehalose 6-Phosphate: An Ancient Signal Linking Carbon Status to Development in the Green Lineage' Franziska Fichtner will talk about how Photosynthesis supplies plants with the carbon needed for growth, development and reproduction. To balance carbon supply with demand, plants must coordinate sugar production, transport and consumption across organs and developmental stages. Sugars contribute to this coordination as both metabolic resources and signals, linking carbon availability to decisions about when and where to grow. Trehalose 6-phosphate (Tre6P) provides a central link between sugar availability, metabolism and development. In flowering plants, it acts as a sucrose-specific signal and regulator of sucrose homeostasis. Sucrose is the main sugar transported from photosynthetic source tissues to growing sink organs in most vascular plants, placing Tre6P at a key interface between carbon supply and use. Beyond metabolic regulation, Tre6P influences developmental processes including flowering and shoot branching, raising questions about when and how it acquired these functions. Franziska Fichtner's research spans green algae, bryophytes and vascular plants to investigate the evolutionary origins and diversification of Tre6P-mediated sugar signalling. Through these comparisons, they test the hypothesis that Tre6P first acquired a role as a sucrose signal in streptophyte algae and was subsequently co-opted in land plants to coordinate carbon status with developmental programmes.