Grant: Collaborative Research and Training Experience

The 'Working on Walls' (WOW) project provides a high level of both scientific and professional post-graduate training for carefully selected students and post-doctoral fellows who are interested in advancing our knowledge frontiers in basic and applied plant biology research. WOW trainees work on a very timely issue, in an intellectually stimulating and highly integrated multidisciplinary environment that both challenges and rewards them. Their training is customized to their professional and academic goals, and is overseen by both life science experts and professional educators. The scientific research focus of the WOW program is discovery of the mechanisms by which plants convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into the largest single biomass resource on the planet, plant cell walls. Despite the central importance of plant cell walls to Earth's overall carbon cycle, the detailed mechanisms by which plants produce and modify their walls are still only poorly understood. In the WOW project, teams of senior and junior investigators with a wide range of expertise use the most sophisticated research tools and techniques available to dissect the molecular processes through which simple sugars are assembled into complex polymers, and then organized, transported and deposited in precise locations outside the cell. These studies complement similar research efforts presently underway in the laboratories of WOW collaborators in Sweden, France, Japan and the USA, and WOW trainees are encouraged to carry out part of their own research in these cooperating institutions. New knowledge generated by the WOW project will make crucial contributions to our understanding of how plant cell walls are formed, what regulates their final shape and chemistry, and how these processes might be modified to improve the economic value and utility of the plant-derived biomass. At the same time, WOW trainees will benefit from an exceptionally rich and professional career-oriented mentorship that prepares them to assume leadership roles both in science and in society at large.