Using the Plant Heat Stress Response to Probe Genome-wide Regulatory Landscapes for Functional Relevance

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will investigate the molecular mechanisms that allow all organisms to respond appropriately to stressful high temperature. Understanding the mechanistic underpinnings of the so-called heat stress response has become a particularly pressing issue for agriculture given rising global temperatures and droughts. Therefore, this research will focus on plants. In addition to providing important scientific insights and enabling future crop applications, this project offers training opportunities for graduate and postdoctoral fellows in plant research. It also provides educational opportunities for undergraduate students who belong to underrepresented groups to study and conduct experiments within the vibrant environment of a major research university. The heat stress response has been a model for gene regulation for almost a century because it is universally conserved, simple to control, and extremely well-studied. In preliminary studies in Arabidopsis thaliana, interrogation of the regulatory landscape during heat stress with DNaseI-seq revealed several unexpected findings, which this project will explore through two aims. First, additional DNaseI-seq experiments will be conducted to establish the generality of the earlier findings for physiologically relevant temperature conditions and to determine the connection between ambient temperature increases and acute heat stress. Second, chromosome conformation (Hi-C) analyses of normal and mutant plants will be used to determine how three-dimensional chromosome organization and specific histone variants contribute to the massive transcriptional changes observed in response to heat stress. The results are expected to lay the foundation for functional analysis of the regulatory elements responsible for thermotolerance in plants.