Institut für Bio- und Geowissenschaften (IBG)

Pflanzenwissenschaften (IBG-2)

‘Runner up’ poster price for Kwabena Agyei at ISRR conference 2024

At the 12^th Symposium of the International Society of Root Research ’Roots [& Roads] to a sustainable future’, our PhD student Kwabena Agyei won runner-up prize for his poster entitled ’Syndrome "basses richesses" disease induced sectorial distribution of photoassimilates in sugar beet revealed by combined MRI-PET’.

Kwabena Agyei presented results from his PhD study at the 12^th Symposium of the International Society of Root Research ’Roots [& Roads] to a sustainable future’ and won a runner-up prize for his poster ’Syndrome “basses richesses” disease induced sectorial distribution of photoassimilates in sugar beet revealed by combined MRI-PET’.

Kwabena’s PhD project takes place in the framework of the ‘phenoRob’ Cluster of Excellence www.phenorob.de. He investigates the influence of an emerging plant disease named Syndrome "basses richesses" (SBR) on growth and spatial and temporal distribution of recently fixed assimilates from photosynthesis within sugar beet.

For a better understanding of the spatio-temporal development of the sugar beet taproot exposed to SBR, he applied Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) that provided insights into the anatomical features of healthy and infected plants at different time points of development. Kwabena discovered that SBR reduced the volume of the sugar beet and negatively affected the development of the inner growth rings. In series of measurements, he complemented the MRI measurements with Positron Emission Tomography (PET) for visualizing the allocation of recently fixed photoassimilates within the taproot. After co-registration of MRI and PET images, he found that SBR induced a heterogeneous distribution of recently fixed photoassimilates and that some sectors of taproot received little to no traces of recently fixed photoassimilates. These sectors closely matched the tissue parts infected with SBR seen after harvest.

Overall, the study illustrates how a pathogen affects sink capacity of recently fixed photoassimilates in a developing storage organ belowground and opens perspectives in uncovering mechanisms of SBRsugar beet interaction.