RII Track-2 FEC: Comparative Genomics and Phenomics Approach to Discover Genes Underlying Heat Stress Resilience in Cereals

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Non-technical DescriptionThis Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) Track-2 Focused EPSCoR Collaborations (RII Track-2 FEC) award is a joint project among the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Arkansas State University, and Kansas State University. The project will create the foundational knowledge needed to improve wheat and rice yields under stressful environments. Trends at the global-, regional-, and farm-level point to an increase in minimum night temperatures that is significantly higher than the rate of increase in maximum day temperatures. Increases in night temperatures significantly decrease the grain yield and quality of major crops such as rice and wheat, which together provide over 50% of the caloric intake for humans worldwide. To ensure global food security, there is an urgent need to improve crop resilience to high night temperature stress-induced yield and quality losses. This project will build upon complementary expertise and infrastructure in Nebraska, Kansas, and Arkansas to develop novel research infrastructure and make discoveries that ultimately lead to development of higher yielding and resilient cultivars for the U.S. farmers. This program will create opportunities to collaborate with key industry partners to ensure that promising discoveries are translated into applications with economic benefit for farmers. Planned workforce development activities will focus on mentoring six early career faculty members, training of postdocs and graduate and undergraduate students, and broadening the participation of underrepresented minorities and underserved rural population in STEM fields.Technical DescriptionThis project aims to elucidate the physiological and genetic basis of high night temperature resiliency of rice and wheat, translate these discoveries into genetic and phenotypic markers for public and private breeding programs, and develop a broad continuum for STEM education. To this end, the investigators are taking a multidisciplinary approach involving plant physiologists, quantitative geneticists, computational biologists, biochemists, engineers, informaticians, and precision agronomists. This program is building genome to phenome linkages using automated image-based phenomics approaches in combination with transcriptomics and metabolomics applied to wheat and rice diversity panels. Gene and pathways discovered from this approach will be functionally tested for their role in improving the temperature resilience in rice and wheat. The planned approach integrates across greenhouse and field scales; captures complex interactions between the environment and genome during grain development at high spatiotemporal resolution; and couples genomics and phenomics outcomes within a quantitative, model-based framework. This research will make the integrated dataset more accessible to biologists through a visualization platform. Six early career faculty will be mentored for professional progress and interactions with international phenomic communities. An Interdisciplinary graduate course will be developed for students in plant sciences, agricultural engineering, computational biology, biochemistry, statistics, and computer sciences. On-line offerings of this course will ensure student participation from all three participating universities.