Chemical and Genetic Dissection of Abscisic Acid Receptor Function

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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.