NSF Award
1541737
Non-technical summary:<br/><br/>Environmental stresses (from conditions such as drought and high or low temperatures) are significant and ongoing concerns for crop productivity. Plants, including crops, respond to cues from the environment in many ways. Among these responses are changes in the ways that genes are expressed. Understanding and manipulating these changes are likely to be profitable means for improving crop productivity. The subject of this research is a protein (termed AtCPSF30) that is important for the responses of plants to environmental stresses, as well as to other cues (or developmental signals) that guide development from a seedling to a mature and productive plant. The goals of the research are to understand how this protein helps the plant to discriminate between different cues, so that subsequent changes in gene expression are appropriate to the respective stress or developmental signal. This research will lead to a better understanding of how plants respond to environmental stresses, and to how stresses affect different aspects of growth and development. This understanding will allow scientists to develop improved crop varieties, and will help producers to make informed decisions regarding crop and variety choice, as well as production management. <br/><br/>Technical description of the project:<br/><br/>The subject of this study is a hypothetical hub that transduces cellular signaling cues into differential poly(A) site choices and phenotypic outcomes. This hub, the 30 kD subunit of the so-called Cleavage and Polyadenylation Specificity Factor in Arabidopsis (AtCPSF30), is regulated in vitro by two distinctive chemical or biochemical signals (calcium and redox signals), and is involved in a range of developmental and physiological responses. The goals of the research are to determine how these different signaling cues are transduced to specific outcomes, potentially through alternative polyadenylation (APA) during pre-mRNA processing. The goals will be accomplished by testing these three hypotheses:<br/><br/>1. Different signaling inputs are processed, through AtCPSF30, into differing sets of APA events and outcomes.<br/>2. AtCPSF30-mediated APA alters mRNA functionality for some of the numerous direct targets of the protein.<br/>3. AtCPSF30-mediated APA affects gene expression early in lateral root development.<br/><br/>Extensive use will be made of systems approaches - both high-throughput DNA sequencing and computational analyses of large datasets. These will be complemented by genetic, transgenic, cellular, molecular, and biochemical studies, all of which will be brought to bear on tests of the stated hypotheses. The outcomes of this research will further an understanding of how RNA processing integrates signaling cues into distinctive molecular outcomes, and how these outcomes affect genetic networks that in turn impact essential growth processes. <br/><br/>The data from this project will be incorporated as appropriate into classes to give the students first-hand information on how the research process works, and how large-scale datasets are collected and analyzed. The laboratory and computational expertise and the datasets that will be generated in the course of the proposed studies will be made available to a consortium of colleges and universities that has the goal of facilitating the development of laboratory and classroom exercises intended to familiarize undergraduate students with high-throughput DNA sequencing. Other outreach activities include: a collaboration with faculty at regional HBCU and highs schools and participation (by Dr. Li) in a project intended to recruit and mentor minority students in research in cell and molecular biology.
