NSF Award
1024999
Intellectual merit. The response of organisms to their environment is the consequence of biological processes that turn genes on and off. These regulatory processes involve the concerted activity of many genes and proteins. Hence, genes and proteins are not independent units, rather their actions are deeply interconnected, influencing each other in their activity and regulation. Experimental approaches that combine different types of data from different types of experiments can be a very powerful way to gain new insights into the gene networks that control these processes. Plant science is now at the crossroads of being able to harvest all of this information for all the genes in a genome. However, very little effort has been made to undertake the more daunting task of assigning biological meaning or functions of all these genes and gene networks on a global scale. During the past decade, vast quantities of genomic resources have been generated, including many genome sequences, knockout collections of plants with mutations in most genes, large clone collections that allow facile manipulation of the expression of any gene, along with various types of genome maps that tell us when genes are turned on and off. By integrating all of these different kinds of data and using all of the resources developed over the past decade, we now aim to create a new type of map called a ?plant growth network?. The goal of this research is to apply a ?systems biology approach? using the tools of genomic science (genome sequences, protein; DNA maps, gene expression maps, gene knockout mutation collections, and other datasets) to understand how plant hormone responsive gene networks control the growth of plants. The long-term impact of this research on agriculture and forestry is expected to be profound. This fundamental information will enable engineering of new crop varieties with superior agronomic traits and will dramatically promote the ability to engineer plants to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.<br/><br/>Broader impacts. The broader impacts of this project will be in two areas. First, the completion of this research will result in important new results for the plant biology community ? it will produce a set of large-scale transcriptional regulatory network information for responses which are linked to all of the major growth-regulating plant hormones. These growth modules are currently very limited in availability thus this knowledge-base will have a large impact on a variety of research studies in both basic plant science and agriculture. All of the results of the research will rapidly be made accessible to the research community. An equally important broad impact area of this research program is student training, which will be provided at a variety of levels, including outreach to high school and undergraduate students as well as postdoctoral mentoring.
