EAPSI:Investigating Vitamin B2 as a Possible Regulator of Metabolism in Plants

Johnson Skylar A, Pullman WA

Investigators

Abstract

This award will be a collaborative effort to investigate a possible regulatory role of vitamin B2 (riboflavin and its derivatives) in the metabolism of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana. The research will be conducted under the direction and expertise of Dr. Miyako Kusano, a noted expert in the field, at RIKEN in Yokohama, Japan, and at University of Tsukuba, also in Japan. Finding that flavins can modulate metabolic pathways in plants as they do in bacteria will be useful for engineering plants which are more resistant to environmental stresses in the field, such as drought, salt, and heat, or for aiding in the production of plants which produce desired compounds. Flavins are essential cofactors for hundreds of enzymes involved in diverse metabolic pathways, and are a promising metabolic regulator. Profiling of the small molecule products of primary metabolism through metabolomics and comparison of these profiles between plants producing different levels of flavins will allow insight into which pathways are affected by flavins. Integration of this data with information on all of the genes being transcribed in the plant, gained from a transcriptomics analysis, will allow a more global understanding of how flavins affect a wide variety of metabolic pathways. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.