Department of Biology

About Pierrick Bru

Research interests

Plants spend their life at the same place where the seeds germinated into the ground. That means plants under natural conditions, constantly encounter various biotic and abiotic factors (e.g., light fluctuations on a cloudy day, cold temperature, drought…) which can potentially restrict plants growth and development. Light serves as an important factor that drives carbon metabolism in plants and supports life on earth. Light fluctuations can affect photosynthesis and reduce carbon gain and productivity because photosynthetic responses are not immediate.  My research interests lie in photoprotective processes, particularly in a sustained energy dissipation by heat also known as non photochemical quenching (NPQ) called qH. My studies focus on understanding the role of the different photosystem II antennae in qH and identifying new molecular players involved in qH.

Publications

• Catanzariti A-M, Do HTT, Bru P, de Sain M, Thatcher LF, Rep M, Jones DA (2017) The tomato I gene for Fusarium wilt resistance encodes an atypical leucine-rich repeat receptor-like protein whose function is nevertheless dependent on SOBIR1 and SERK3/BAK1. The Plant Journal 89:1195–1209. https://doi.org/10.1111/tpj.13458
  
• Adkar-Purushothama CR, Bru P, Perreault J-P (2017) 3′ RNA ligase mediated rapid amplification of cDNA ends for validating viroid induced cleavage at the 3′ extremity of the host mRNA. Journal of Virological Methods 250:29–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jviromet.2017.09.023
  
• Adkar-Purushothama CR, Bolduc F, Bru P, Perreault J-P (2020) Insights Into Potato Spindle Tuber Viroid Quasi-Species From Infection to Disease. Frontiers in Microbiology 11:1235. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2020.01235
  
• Bru P, Nanda S, Malnoë A (2020) A Genetic Screen to Identify New Molecular Players Involved in Photoprotection qH in Arabidopsis thaliana. Plants 9:1565. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants9111565
  
• Martínez-Hidalgo P, Humm EA, Still DW, Shi B, Pellegrini M, de la Roca G, Veliz E, Maymon M, Bru P, Huntemann M, Clum A, Palaniappan K, Varghese N, Mukherjee S, Reddy TBK, Daum C, Ivanova NN, Kyrpides NC, Shapiro N, Eloe-Fadrosh EA, Hirsch AM (2021) Medicago root nodule microbiomes: insights into a complex ecosystem with potential candidates for plant growth promotion. Plant Soil. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-021-05247-7
  
• Bru P, Steen CJ, Park S, Amstutz CL, Sylak-Glassman EJ, Lam L, Fekete A, Mueller MJ, Longoni F, Fleming GR, Niyogi KK, Malnoë A (2022) The major trimeric antenna complexes serve as a site for qH-energy dissipation in plants. Journal of Biological Chemistry 102519. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbc.2022.102519