The PhD thesis is focused on a transcriptomics-based comparison of barley cultivars differing with respect to their low temperature acclimation capacity, with a particular focus on genes transcribed in the leaf and crown. The crown was of interest because of its importance for the winter survival of the plant. To involve both the first and the second phase of hardening, the test plants were exposed first to +3řC for 21 days, followed by - 3řC for one day. Freezing damage was assessed by measuring electrolyte leakage (Papers 2 and 3), using a modified version of a protocol developed by Prášil and Zámečník (1998). The same protocol was adapted to evaluate crown regrowth (Paper 2); for this purpose, the plants were cooled, then replanted and cut above the crown, and their survival rate calculated over the following week. Each RNA sample was queried by hybridization to an Affymetrix 22 K Barley1 GeneChip Genome Array (Close et al. 2004). The data were statistically analysed with the help of the software packages R, MAS 5.0 (Ihaka & Gentleman 1996) (Papers 2 and 3), Gene Spring GX 7.3 (Agilent Technologies, Santa Clara CA) and MapMan (Thimm et al. 2004; Usadel et al. 2005) (Paper 2), the "Self-Organizing Maps" algorithm (Kohonen et al. 1996) (Paper 3) and MIPS FunCat (Ruepp et al. 2004) (Paper 2). Paper...

In the presented work the relationship between transcription factors and male gametophyte development was studied. The Ph.D. Thesis covers selection of candidate genes, wide-scale screening of T-DNA mutant lines and detailed analysis of a selected transcription factor on pollen development.

The Gram-negative aerobic coccobacillus Bordetella pertussis is one of the few exclusively human pathogens and the main causative agent of the respiratory infectious disease called pertussis, or whooping cough. Despite global vaccination programs, pertussis remains an important public-health burden and still accounts for over 100,000 infant deaths and over a dozen of millions of whooping cough cases every year. Substantial effort is devoted to studies on the mechanisms of action of virulence factors of B. pertussis, but the biology of interactions of B. pertussis with its human host remains largely underexplored. Evolution, genetics and adaptation of B. pertussis to the complex environment of human nasopharynx and the mechanisms enabling B. pertussis to overcome host innate and adaptive mucosal immune defenses, remain poorly understood. In such situations, unbiased exploratory omics approaches represent valuable tools for uncovering of unknown aspects of host-pathogen interactions and open the path to detailed analysis of virulence-underlying processes by mechanistic studies. In this thesis, I am presenting the results of three omics projects on B. pertussis biology that involved high-throughput proteomics. In the inital phosphoprotemics project, we analyzed the kinase signaling pathways hijacked...