Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
As the climate warms, significant crop loss is anticipated. To sustainably meet the food demands of a growing population amidst climate change, cultivating higher-yielding crops resilient to rising temperatures is necessary. As climate change threatens sustainable yield, there's an urgent need to identify and re-engineer genes involved in environmental stress tolerance.Plants possess intricate mechanisms to anticipate their environment. Specifically, plants anticipate the daily cycles of the rising and setting of the sun which alters the plant's environment in terms of hours of sunlight and temperature. The circadian clock, acting as a self-sustaining 24-hour timekeeper, plays a crucial role. It allows plants to synchronize biological processes with daily cycles. This synchronization is known as entrainment and is necessary for biological events to occur at the appropriate time of day. The clock is similar in essentially all plants, insights gained from model plant studies hold relevance for most crop species. Controlling various aspects of plant development, including photosynthesis, growth, and stress responses, the circadian clock for essential for crop performance. While considerable research has focused on light entrainment, temperature entrainment remains understudied.Against the backdrop of climate change and mounting crop demands, unraveling how the circadian clock orchestrates stress responses and growth in extreme conditions may greatly improve agriculture. This project promises to identify target genes crucial for breeding high-yielding stress-resilient crops, enhancing productivity amidst escalating environmental pressures.
Animal Health Component
0%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
50%
Applied
50%
Developmental
0%
Goals / Objectives
There are three major goals of this project to understand the circadian regulation of B-Box proteins in the context of abiotic stress response in plants:Aim 1: Determine the functional roles of candidate BBXs in regulating heat and drought stress response in Arabidopsis.Aim 2: Determine how the clock influences BBXs' response to stress at different times of day.Aim 3: Determine the functional role of BBXs in controlling temperature entrainment of the clock.Objectives associated with these goals are:Aim 1.1: Create knockout and overexpression lines in Arabidopsis.Aim 1.2: Determine the drought and heat stress responsiveness and tolerance of candidate BBXs.Aim 1.3: Identify downstream targets of candidate BBXs.Aim 2.1: Determine whether time of day of heat stress is important for tolerance to stress.Aim 2.2: Determine whether gene expression regulated by the BBXs is time-of-day dependent.Aim 3.1: Determine the expression of clock genes in BBX knockdown and overexpression lines.Aim 3.2: Determine whether the BBXs play a role in thermocycle entrainment of the clock.Aim 3.3: Identify the direct targets of BBX6 playing a role in thermosensing and entrainment.
Project Methods
This project will include many molecular and genetic techniques, including wet-lab and computational work. Established methods for CRISPR gene editing and cloning will be employed to create the necessary Arabidopsis lines. Both established physiological and molecular phenotyping assays will be executed with KO and OX lines. Gene expression analysis through methods such as qPCR, RNA-seq, and LUC reporter assays will be conducted. Gene regulatory networks will be analyzed and confirmed using genetic approaches.