- Written by Ivan Dulgerov
Students held their practical training in Biotechnology at CPSBB
Tenth graders from the Professional School of Food Technology in Plovdiv visited CPSBB as part of their practical education in Biotechnology. The two-day visit was organized under the Memorandum of Cooperation which was signed by the management of the school and CPSBB in 2022.
The researchers from CPSBB, Dr. Nikola Staykov (Molecular Biologist) and Dr. Alicja Wieteska (Agronomist), guided the students through the laboratories, greenhouses, and plant growth chambers in the scientific campus, presenting some of the current research projects of CPSBB and the state-of-the-art technical equipment of CPSBB funded by the Operational Programme “Science and Education for Smart Growth” within the PlantaSYST project.
The large-scale research projects NatGenCrop, BOOSTER, AgroDigiRise, and HealthyDiets4Africa, currently conducted in the greenhouses of CPSBB, were the main topics of presentations to the students. Dr. Alicja Wieteska guided them through the greenhouse facilities where they could observe hundreds of experimental lines of peppers, tomatoes, maize, strawberries, and raspberries. All those crop lines are grown by several scientific teams at CPSBB under specific stress conditions to achieve valuable data and results which would help the scientists to develop new biostimulants, as well as cultivars and crop varieties, resilient to abiotic stress (drought, high temperatures, salinity).
The students were introduced to basic rules for good laboratory practices (GLP) and some specific activities in plant phenotyping. They were asked to phenotype some of the experimental lines of tomatoes from the GWAS panel of the NatGenCrop project, from both control and stressed conditions, in terms of fruit number (green and matured) and BER (blossom end rot) – a physiological disease caused by a localized deficiency of calcium in the tomato fruits.
The students were also introduced to some of the high-end equipment at CPSBB – a bioreactor system for sustainable cultivation of cell cultures from rare plant species and obtaining valuable natural molecules, freezers for deep freezing and long-term sample storage at -80 °C, GC-MS system for quantitative and qualitative gas spectrometry analysis of samples, UHPLC-MS system for quantitative and qualitative analysis of samples by dissolving them in organic solvents, ICP-MS system to determine the elemental composition of samples after their preliminary mineralization, etc.
Dr. Nikola Staykov also showed the students some of the plant growth rooms at CPSBB, where scientists propagate with in vitro methods the resurrection plant Haberlea rhodopensis. This unique plant species is of special interest to the researchers with its high resilience to drought – even after extreme drought and complete drying, upon subsequent rehydration the plant recovers completely. Haberlea rhodopensis also demonstrates high tolerance to other extreme conditions such as low temperatures and prolonged darkness. Scientists at CPSBB study the molecular mechanisms of plant adaptation to such types of abiotic stress. The main goal is to apply the results of the studies to economically important crops, with the aim of increasing their resilience to abiotic stresses.
CPSBB, together with researchers from the University of Potsdam and the “Max Planck” Institute for Plant Molecular Physiology in Germany, have recently successfully sequenced the genome of Haberlea rhodopensis and published it in the scientific article with free access “The genome of Haberlea rhodopensis provides insights into the mechanisms for tolerance to multiple extreme environments”, in “Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences”.