RESEARCH

My research covers the following main area of plant desiccation tolerance:

South Africa finds itself progressively fighting drought conditions in the agricultural arena. We have therefore started an investigation which involves a comparison between the desiccation tolerance properties of the cultivated tomato, Lycopersicon esculentum (with well characterised genetic makeup), growing under water stress conditions and that of its wild relatives such as Lycopersicon peruvianum. The latter species grows in the desert areas of South America and is desiccation tolerant. We are looking for desiccation specific genes (coding for drought-inducible histone H1 and LEA-type protein products, for example) in these wild relatives that could possibly be introduced into cultivated varieties to make them more desiccation tolerant.

PUBLICATIONS

Rodrigues, J. De A., Brandt, W.F. and von Holt, C. (1979)
Plant histone 2 from wheat germ, a family of histone H2A variants. Partial amino acid sequences. Biochem. Biophys. ACTA, 578, 196 - 206.

Rodrigues, J. De A., Brandt, W.F. and von Holt, C. (1985)
The amino acid sequence of wheat histone H2A(1). A core histone with a C-terminal extension. Eur. J. Biochem., 150, 499 - 506.

Rodrigues, J. De A., Brandt, W.F. and von Holt, C. (1988)
The primary structure of the histone H2A(2) type from wheat germ. A core histone type with both N- and C-terminal extensions. Eur. J. Biochem., 173, 555 - 560.

Brandt, W.F., Rodrigues, J. De A. and von Holt, C. (1988)
The amino acid sequence of wheat histone H2B(2). A core histone with a novel repetitive N-terminal extension. Eur. J. Biochem., 173, 547 - 554.

Modro, A.M., Rodrigues, J. De A., Brandt, W.F. and von Holt, C. (1988)
The primary structure of histone H3 from wheat. Biol. Chem. Hoppe-S., 369, 193 - 197.

Von Holt, C., Brandt, W.F., Greyling, H.J., Lindsey, G.G., Retief, J.D., Rodrigues, J.De A., Schwager, S. and Sewell B.T. (1989)
The isolation and characterisation of histones. Methods in Enzymology 170, 431 - 523.

Rodrigues, J. A., Combrink, J. and Brandt, W. F. (1994)
Derivatisation of polyvinylidene difluoride membranes for the solid-phase sequence analysis of a phosphorylated sea urchin embryo histone H1 peptide. Anal. Biochem. 216, 365 - 372.

Brandt, W.F., Schwager, S.U.L., Rodrigues, J.A., and Busslinger, M. (1997)
Isolation and amino acid sequence analysis reveal an ancient evolutionary origin of the cleavage stage (CS) histones of the sea urchin. Eur. J. Biochem., 247, 784 - 791.