Investigate the Molecular Basis of Crosstalk between the Circadian Clock and Innate Immunity in Arabidopsis

University Of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

Pathogen-induced diseases lead to tremendous economic loss worldwide. The use of chemicals and pesticides to control plant diseases risks collateral damage to the environment and human health. Therefore it is important to understand how plants fight against pathogens and subsequently to use such information to control plant resistance to devastating diseases. Upon frequent challenges imposed by pathogens, plants activate different defense responses at different times of a day, a process recently shown to be controlled by the endogenous biological timekeeper called the circadian clock. The circadian clock integrates temporal information with environmental stimuli (such as pathogen infections) to regulate many biological processes, including plant defense responses. The investigators previously demonstrated that changes in plant defense status could affect clock activity. However how defense responses and clock activity are co-regulated in plants remains unclear. This project seeks insights into the mechanisms that coordinate the circadian clock with defense responses. Importantly, this project provides excellent training opportunities to students, especially women, underrepresented minority students and K-12 science teachers. Students and postdocs involved in this project will be broadly trained in biology and bioinformatics so as to be better prepared for future careers in science. Research experiences will also be provided to K-12 teachers from low performing public schools in the Baltimore area. Science teachers are the key to making connections between knowledge acquired in the classroom and research conducted in the laboratory. The research experience that will be provided will enable them to design a more effective science curriculum for their classes. The goal of this collaborative project is to understand the interplay between the controls of innate immunity and the circadian clock in Arabidopsis. Specifically the project seeks to identify and characterize genes that control defense and/or clock activities and elucidate how these genes act together to orchestrate disease resistance, growth, and development of Arabidopsis. To address this goal, a team of experts in plant defense, circadian clock, and systems biology fields will employ traditional molecular, genetic and biochemical approaches as well as computational modeling to implement the proposed activities. Information obtained from this study will enhance our fundamental knowledge about disease resistance, growth and development of plants. Genes identified from this study can be used as molecular tools to genetically manipulate disease resistance traits in economically important crop plants. Such plants will reduce our dependency on chemicals and pesticides, thus protecting the environment and human health and supporting sustainable agriculture.