Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
Environmental stresses such as drought and heat cause significant losses in agriculture. Water availability is the No. 1 limiting factor for crop production, but heat wave is now becoming a serious problem. Climate change prediction indicates that many parts of the world are becoming hotter in the summer, including the most productive agricultural land in the US. The combined effects of high temperature and drought have detrimental effects on the growth and productivity of crops. Consequently, cotton production in the US is facing a challenge that American farmers have never experienced before. To increase cotton's yield, even to sustain its production in the US, one must develop drought- and heat-tolerant cotton varieties. One way to increase drought- and heat-tolerance in cotton is to overexpress genes that confer increased abiotic stress tolerance in cotton, which would lead to higher yield under heat stress and low irrigation conditions. We recently demonstrated that OsSIZ1/AVP1 co-overexpressing cotton plants had higher water use efficiency and heat tolerance, which led to a huge increase of cotton fiber for cotton grown in dryland conditions. In addition, we created another transgenic cotton line, RCA/AVP1 co-overexpressing cotton, and we showed that this line also outperformed wild-type cotton under combined drought and heat stresses. Our recent data showed that OsSIZ1/RCA co-overexpressing Arabidopsis plants were even more tolerant than OsSIZ1/AVP1 co-overexpressing and RCA/AVP1 co-overexpressing Arabidopsis plants under every abiotic stress condition that we tested. OsSIZ1/RCA co-overexpressing Arabidopsis plants produced 50% more seeds than OsSIZ1/AVP1 co-overexpressing Arabidopsis plants. Based on our experience working with transgenic cotton plants, we believe that OsSIZ1/RCA co-overexpressing cotton will outperform OsSIZ1/AVP1 co-overexpressing cotton under combined drought and heat stresses, and further increase fiber yield in field conditions. Therefore, we have introduced this OsSIZ1/RCA co-overexpression cassette into cotton, and we hope to prove that OsSIZ1/RCA co-overexpressing cotton will outperform OsSIZ1/AVP1 co-overexpressing cotton in laboratory as well as in field conditions. We want to show that it is possible to further improve cotton production in the US and increase US cotton export.
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
50%
Applied
50%
Developmental
0%
Goals / Objectives
To demonstrate that co-overexpression of OsSIZ1 and RCA in cotton will drastically improve cotton's drought and heat tolerance and substantially improve cotton production in the US and help increase US cotton export. Furthermore, this project will serve as a proof-of-concept that co-overexpression of OsSIZ1 and RCA will substantially increase yields of other major crops such as soybean, alfalfa, corn, and wheat in the US and in the world, making major crops more climate resilient in the future.
Project Methods
All techniques commonly used in molecular biology, genetic engineering, tissue culture, plant transformation, physiological analysis, statistical analysis and field testing will be used in this project.