Professor Frans Maathuis
Emeritus Professor

Profile

Career

Research

Overview

Abiotic stress and mineral nutrition in plants

Agriculture will have to generate a 40-50% increase in food production in the next decades. One strategy to achieve this is developing improved crop tolerance to detrimental abiotic conditions that occur all over the globe and can depress crop yields by up to 80%. Work in my lab aimed at understanding plant responses to stresses such as salinity and arsenic toxicity but also the way plants deal with a lack of essential mineral nutrients such as potassium and non-essential ones such as silicon.

To study the above aspects, we used a range of techniques that vary from single molecule electrophysiology (eg patch clamp), to molecular biology and whole plant physiology.

Discoveries

My work contributed to unravelling the molecular uptake mechanism of the major nutrient potassium in plants. In the area of plant salinity stress, my lab was the first to identify cyclic nucleotide regulated channels as influx pathways for sodium in plants. Molecular work on arsenic in plants led to the first identification of specific aquaporins that are responsible for arsenite uptake.

Publications

Selected publications

Maathuis FJM, Prins HBA (1990). Patch clamp studies on root cell vacuoles of a salt tolerant and a salt sensitive Plantago species. Plant Physiol, 92: 23 28.  

Maathuis FJM, Sanders D (1992). Plant membrane transport. Curr Opin Cell Biol, 4: 661 669. 

Maathuis FJM, Sanders D (1994) Mechanism of high affinity potassium uptake in roots of Arabidopsis thaliana. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 91: 9272-9276. 

Walker NA, Sanders D, Maathuis  FJM (1996). High affinity potassium uptake by plants. Science, 373: 977-978. 

Maathuis FJM, Sanders D (1999). Plasma membrane transport in context - making sense out of complexity. Curr Opin Plant Biol, 2:236-243. 

Maathuis FJM, Amtmann A (1999). K+ nutrition and Na+ toxicity: The basis of cellular K+/Na+ ratios. Ann Bot, 84:123-133.

Sokolovski SG, Meharg AA, Maathuis FJM (2002) Calluna vulgaris root cells show increased capacity for amino acid uptake when colonised with the mycorrhizal fungus Hymenoscyphus ericae. New Phytol, 155:525-530.

Peiter E, Maathuis FJM, Mills L, Knight H, Hetherington AM and Sanders D (2005) TPC1, a vacuolar Ca2+-activated channel involved in germination and stomatal regulation. Nature 434:404-408.

Maathuis FJM  (2006) cGMP modulates gene transcription and cation transport in  Arabidopsis roots. Plant J, 45:700-711.

Tripathi RD, Srivastava S, Mishra S, Singh N, Tuli R, Gupta DK, Maathuis FJM (2007) Arsenic hazards: Strategies for tolerance and remediation by plants. Trends Biotechnology 25:158-165.

Gobert A, Isayenkov S, Voelker C, Czempinski K, Maathuis FJM (2007) The two pore channel TPK1 gene encodes the vacuolar K+ (VK) conductance and plays a role in K+ homeostasis. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 104:10726-10731.

Maathuis FJM (2007) Monovalent cation transporters; Establishing a link between bioinformatics and physiology. Marshner Review, Plant and Soil 301:1-15.

Isayenkov SV and Maathuis FJM (2008) The Arabidopsis thaliana aquaglyceroporin AtNIP7;1 is a pathway for arsenite uptake. FEBS lett, 582 1625-1628.

Isayenkov SV, Isner JC and Maathuis FJM (2011) Rice Two Pore K+ channels express in different types of vacuole. Plant Cell. 23: 756-768.

Maathuis FJM (2011) Vacuolar Two Pore K+ channels act as vacuolar osmosensors. New Phytologist. 191: 84-91.

Ahmad I, Devonshire J, Mohamed R, Schultze M, Maathuis FJM (2015) Overexpression of the Potassium Vacuolar Channel TPKb in Small Vacuoles confers Osmotic and Drought Tolerance to Rice. New Phytol. 209: 1040-1048 doi: 10.1111/nph.13708.

Patishtan J, Hartley TN, Fonseca de Carvalho R, Maathuis FJM (2017)  Genome wide association studies to identify rice salt-tolerance markers. Plant Cell Environ 41:970-982 doi:10.1111/pce.12975.

Demidchik V, Maathuis FJM, Voitsekhovskaja O. (2017) Unraveling the plant signalling machinery: an update on the cellular and genetic basis of plant signal transduction. Func Plant Biol, 45:1–8.

Isner JC, Begum A, Nuehse T, Hetherington AM, Maathuis FJM. (2018) KIN7 kinase regulates the vacuolar TPK1 K+ channel during stomatal closure*. Current Biol 28:466–472. doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.12.046.

Thorne SJ, Hartley SE, Maathuis FJM. (2020) Is Silicon a Panacea for Alleviating Drought and Salt Stress in Crops? Front. Plant Sci. 

Podar D and Maathuis FJM. (2021) Primary nutrient sensors in plants. iScience 25(4). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.104029.

Thorne SJ, Stirnberg PM, Hartley SE, Maathuis FJM. (2022)  The Ability of Silicon Fertilisation to Alleviate Salinity Stress in Rice is Critically Dependent on Cultivar Rice 15(1):8. doi: 10.1186/s12284-022-00555-7.

External activities

Memberships

Current and previous memberships

• Visiting Professorship, Lanzhou University (2006-2012)
• Elected member of the Royal Society of Biology (2019)
• Member of Executive Committee of International Society of Environmental Botanists (ISEB) since 2008
• External advisor of Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR)
• Member of the external review panel Agence d'Evaluation de la Recherche et des établissements d'Enseignement Supérieur (AERES)
• Member of BBSRC pool of experts 2010-2014
• ‘AgroFood’ expert for EU Framework 7 ERA-NET projects (EVAL-INCO)

Editorial duties

• Associate Editor for Functional Plant Biology (since 2014)
• Guest Editor for Methods in Molecular Biology (2010-2011)
• Member of Board of Editors for Frontiers in Plant Science (2009-2018)
• Section Editor for Plant and Soil (2008-2018)
• Monitoring Editor for Plant Physiology (2011-2016)
• Associate Editor for Plant Physiology (2017-2021)