Details of Award
NERC Reference : NE/M018768/1
Rewiring the Plant Transcriptome for Improved Environmental Stress Tolerance
Fellowship Award
- Fellow:
- Dr O P F Windram, Imperial College London, Life Sciences
- Grant held at:
- Imperial College London, Life Sciences
- Science Area:
- Terrestrial
- Overall Classification:
- Panel C
- ENRIs:
- Biodiversity
- Environmental Risks and Hazards
- Global Change
- Science Topics:
- Transcriptional regulation
- Transcriptomics
- Plant defence responses
- Interaction with organisms
- Stress responses in plants
- Plant responses to environment
- Bioinformatics
- Bioinform. for transcriptomics
- Systems biology
- Research approaches
- Abstract:
- Plants need to detect and respond to a wide variety of environmental challenges. Activation of plant environmental stress responses represents a significant cost to the plant requiring resource reallocation away from growth and reproduction, processes critical to crop yield. Understanding these interactions are key to ensuring sufficient and stable food production as the human population grows and climate change increases environmental uncertainty. We do know that plant-environmental interactions are governed by complex networks that allow plants to adapt and respond to external stresses. However we do not have a detailed map of these networks and only know of a few key control components in these networks. For this fellowship I propose a novel approach that will allow me to build a detailed comprehensive map of a plant defence network governing environmental stress responses against pathogens. Here I also propose a novel approach that will facilitate the analysis of this plant defence response networks to identify key control points. Identifying key control points will aid the development of crops with enhanced stress tolerance. To this end I propose an experimental approach that change the way these key network points function by rewiring the connections between them. By screening large number of different network rewiring events we can begin to test how well we understand the structure of these defence networks, while at the same time identify specific rewiring events that improve plant tolerance to environmental stress. This will be achieved through three objectives: 1. Construct a Comprehensive Network Model of Plant Defence Regulation 2. Develop a Method to Identify and Select Key Network Components for Network rewiring 3. Experimentally Rewire the Plant Defence Network and Screen for Rewired Networks that Improve Stress Tolerance This proposal will serve to answer many fundamental questions about how the plant stress response networks function. Additionally, the experimental approach emulates natural processes of network evolution in plants. Therefore this research will also provide new understanding for how plant stress networks have evolved. I will conduct this fellowship at Silwood Park, Imperial College London as an Independent Research Fellow. My work will contribute to a new Grand Challenges in Ecosystems and the Environment initiative and help tackle a major initiative challenge of addressing Food security in a changing world. Network rewiring will contribute to improving our understanding of how to counteract environmental stress such as pathogen infection in agricultural crops. This can be used to direct crop breeding efforts to develop useful stress resistant traits in crops, but also offers a strategy to synthetically evolve crops to be more tolerant to different environmental stresses when lack of suitable breeding stock is available.
- NERC Reference:
- NE/M018768/1
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- Research Fellowship
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- Omics Fellowships
This fellowship award has a total value of £511,117
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| DI - Other Costs | Indirect - Indirect Costs | DA - Estate Costs | DI - Staff | DI - T&S | DA - Other Directly Allocated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £50,287 | £162,002 | £68,998 | £210,375 | £14,344 | £5,111 |
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