NSF NPGI Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2016

Potter Kevin, Carrboro NC

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF National Plant Genome Initiative Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2015. The fellowship supports a research and training plan in a host laboratory for the Fellow who also presents a plan to broaden participation in biology. The title of the research and training plan for this fellowship to Kevin Potter is "Uncovering the transcriptional and genomic dynamics of cytokinin signaling in rice". The host institution for the fellowship is the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and the sponsoring scientist is Dr. Joseph Kieber. Cytokinins are plant hormones that are known to regulate various aspects of growth and development and other physiological processes in plants. The overarching goal of the project is to gain a deeper understanding into how cytokinin regulates these processes by using an integrative transcriptomic and genomic approach to build a dynamic model of the cytokinin response in rice. These new insights may provide new effective strategies to engineer this signaling pathway to modify various agronomical traits in rice needed to meet the future food supply and demand. The broader impacts of the project consist of training undergraduate and graduate students, assisting the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center with a series of workshops designed for UNC graduate students, and participating in the North Carolina DNA Day, which is an annual event where North Carolina researchers from various institutions advocate careers in science and biotechnology and give biology lessons to high schools throughout North Carolina. Training objectives include acquiring expertise with new transcriptomic and genomics methods, and bioinformatics tools. This project seeks to: 1) kinetically characterize the transcriptional and open chromatin profiles using RNA-Seq and formaldehyde-assisted isolation of regulatory elements (FAIRE-seq), respectively, in response to cytokinins in shoots and roots in rice; 2) integrate these datasets, build dynamic models for the cytokinin response, and identify cis-acting regulatory elements by utilizing a variety of bioinformatics tools; and 3) adapt assay for transposase accessible chromatin followed by sequencing (ATAC-seq) for use in rice and then use this method in conjunction with RNA-Seq to build dynamic tissue-specific cytokinin response models in the shoot and root meristems in rice. These models will be tested and validated in future studies by altering different modules and components to ascertain their specific function in the cytokinin signaling pathway and effects on agronomical traits in rice. The collected sequencing datasets will be made available at the Sequence Read Archive at NCBI.