Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE
(N/A)
RIVERSIDE,CA 92521
Performing Department
Botany and Plant Sciences
Non Technical Summary
This project aims to improve crop protection from floods and droughts to ensure robust future harvests. It will apply modern genetic and genomic technologies to identify how plants dynamically control characteristics of their roots and shoots that increase survival of water extremes and nutrient deficiency. It will use advanced genomic technologies to examine how and when specific cells activate beneficial responses. It will explore the interactions between plant roots and soil microbes that enhance nutrient uptake and possibly also protect plants in suboptimal environments. The project focuses on rice, which has the ability to endure water extremes. By comparing the how rice types with effective water extreme resilience to rice types or other crops with less effective resilience, we will identify, test and define key mechanisms that may be harnessed for crop improvement.
Animal Health Component
30%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
60%
Applied
30%
Developmental
10%
Goals / Objectives
(1) To define mechanisms of stress resilience loci to aid their effective mobilization as solutions through breeding, gene or genome engineering in rice and other crops.(2) To investigate the complex interactions between roots, beneficial plant microbes, and water deficit stress using high-resolution genomics in rice.To generate public datasets, bioinformatic pipelines, and visualization tools for resolution of spatial and temporal gene regulation.(3) Tounravel the coordination of transcriptional and posttranscriptional regulation that determines tight temporal regulation of genes critical for stress responses in rice and other plants.
Project Methods
This project will utilize diverse experimental approaches in plant genetics, molecular biology, cell biology, biochemistry, developmental biology, and physiology. The project will develop and implement genomic, metabolomic and bioinformatic technologies to address fundamental questions about how plants respond to and survive the challenges of a dynamic environment, including interactions with the soil microbiome. The precise methodology will depend upon the question to be addressed. The guiding principles of the research will be to perform experimentation with appropriate statistical rigor, including evaluation with biological replications that meet or exceed community standards. Data acquisition will be performed using state-of-the art technologies for precision and accuracy. Experimentation will include biological and replication controls, standard measurements and will be reported along with the detailed descriptions of experimental parameters that are necessary to enable others to repeat the methodology or hypothesis driven experimentation. The project will also provide computational procedures and 'omic datasets in repositories that are highly accessible to the community. More details are provided in the project proposal.