Chemical and Genetic Dissection of Abscisic Acid Receptor Function

最近的2012年干旱是近五年来最严重的干旱，并对全球经济造成了影响。在生长季节缺乏足够的水是称为非生物胁迫的一系列不利环境条件之一；其他非生物压力包括高土壤盐度，早期冻结和洪水，等等。鉴于它们的破坏性后果，人们对了解植物用来应对非生物胁迫的内部机制有广泛的兴趣，以便利用这些保护机制来提高作物在不利生长条件下的产量。PI的研究重点是非生物应激反应的关键协调者，一种叫做脱落酸（ABA）的激素。在有压力的条件下，ABA水平会上升，并引发生理变化，帮助植物度过逆境。人们普遍认为，这种激素及其用于适应非生物应激源的特定蛋白质可以用来改善农业，这样农民就可以获得每年因干旱等恶劣天气事件而损失的部分产量。在之前NSF资助的研究中，PI发现了一个新的ABA受体家族。受体是感知和传递ABA水平变化和外部胁迫信息的第一类蛋白质，是植物对非生物胁迫反应的关键中介。在目前的项目中，PI的实验室正在使用遗传、生化和化学方法的组合来剖析新发现的受体家族的功能，目的是确定哪些受体对非生物应激耐受性最重要。这一努力的更广泛影响将是研究生和博士后培训，以及操纵植物应激反应的新生物技术战略，这将最终加强美国农业。

The recent 2012 drought was the most severe drought in the last half-decade and has had global economic consequences. The lack of sufficient water during a growth season is one of a number of adverse environmental conditions called abiotic stresses; other abiotic stresses include high soil salinity, early freezes and flooding, to name a few. Given their devastating consequences, there is broad interest in understanding the internal mechanism that plants use to cope with abiotic stresses so that these protective mechanisms can be harnessed to improve crop yield under adverse growth conditions. The PI's research focuses on the key orchestrator of abiotic stress responses, a hormone called Abscisic acid (ABA). ABA levels rise under stressful conditions and trigger physiological changes that help a plant endure the bad times. It is widely believed that this hormone and the specific set of proteins it uses for acclimating to abiotic stressors can be harnessed to improve agriculture so that farmers can capture some of the yield that is lost every year to adverse weather events such as drought. In prior NSF funded research the PI identified a new family of receptors for ABA. Receptors are the first proteins that perceive and transmit information about changing ABA levels and external stress and are critical intermediaries in a plant's response to abiotic stress. In the current project, the PI's laboratory is dissecting the function of the newly discovered receptor family using a combination of genetic, biochemical and chemical approaches with the goal of establishing which of the many receptors are most important for abiotic stress tolerance. The broader impacts of this effort will be graduate and postdoctoral training as well as new biotechnological strategies for manipulating plant stress responses, which will ultimately strengthen U.S. agriculture.