Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The overarching goal of my research program is to determine how plants process environmental information through gene regulatory networks and ultimately to use this knowledge to enhance climate change resilience in essential agricultural crops. The specific objectives of this proposal are to characterize gene regulation at the individual cellular level during development and in the context of development-altering stress. This will involve analyses of changes in transcriptome profiles and chromatin dynamics during plant development as DNA accessibility is a requirement for gene activation. This information will provide the basis for developing computational methods for modelling gene regulatory networks. This knowledge will be used to develop key strategies for the rational modification of plant responses to environmental stressors - a challenge of critical importance for global food security. The long-term objective of my research program is to understand how plants process environmental information through gene regulatory networks and to use this knowledge to enhance their resilience to climate change. My research program is dedicated to developing experimental methods to quantify regulatory processes in space and time, and to developing computational methods to leverage these data for GRN prediction. To advance these goals, we must define regulatory interactions associated with stress resilience, and devise systems for prioritizing regulatory interactions for genetic manipulation. I propose three short term aims that crosscut these knowledge gaps and that contribute to my long-term objective. (1) To characterize the developmental trajectories of rice leaf cells in well-watered and growth limiting drought conditions; (2) to characterize the contribution of chromatin dynamics to cell fate specification; and, (3) to predict global gene regulatory networks in cells undergoing cell fate specification. The proposed research will directly impact our mechanistic understanding of development and how environmental stimuli influence through regulated gene expression. This knowledge will improve our understanding the biological processes driving cell fate specification which can be leveraged to for use in rational crop improvement. The knowledge and methodological advanced brought forth through the proposed work will also have broad applicability in other areas of plant and animal agriculture, environmental science, and medicine, because many key features of eukaryotic gene regulation are conserved across taxa. This program will provide high quality training to HQP in leading edge molecular and computational biology methods, that will be in-demand by employers in the public and private sectors.