DISSECTING HORMONAL CROSSTALK DURING TOMATO FRUIT DEVELOPMENT

植物对人类生命至关重要，它们提供食物、纤维和大量用于医药和日常生活其他方面的化学物质。植物激素是植物产生的控制植物生理机能的化学物质。本研究应用最新技术同时测量植物发育过程中几种类型植物激素的水平。此外，还评估了植物激素调节基因表达的水平，所得数据用于确定这些分子如何协同工作以协调植物生长。本研究结果为培育下一代高产、耐环境胁迫的先进作物品种提供了必要的知识。此外，本研究还生成了第一个植物物种的激素图谱。这个荷尔蒙图谱是在大学本科生的帮助下编制的，将向公众和科学界开放，用于教育和研究。开展外展活动，促进K-12和本科生参与科学研究。了解植物发育对调控植物生长和产量至关重要。植物激素是植物生长和对环境反应的重要调节因子。本项目利用最新的高通量质谱和基因表达技术来产生定量输出，并确定番茄中不同激素通路之间的基本串扰关系。这项研究的背景是关注水果的发育。这项研究为激素串扰提供了重要的见解，并可能预测已知以及尚未确定的激素相互作用。这种相互作用可能成为未来开发具有不同功能的合成激素网络的基础。随着植物生长的合成微调的使用，提高产量的先进作物是可能的。此外，这个项目产生代谢组学、遗传、分子和生物信息学工具，将提供给科学界。这些工具有望极大地促进对植物生理学其他方面的植物激素调控的理解。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Plants are essential for human life, providing food, fiber and a multitude of chemicals used in medicine and other aspects of our everyday life. Phytohormones are chemicals produced by plants to control plant physiology. This research applies recent technologies to simultaneously measure the levels of several types of phytohormones during plant development. In addition, levels of phytohormone-regulated gene expression are assessed and the resulting data are used to determine how these molecules work together to orchestrate plant growth. Results from this research provide essential knowledge for cultivating the future generation of advanced crop varieties with increased productivity and environmental stress tolerance. In addition, this research generates the first Hormonal Atlas of a plant species. This Hormonal Atlas, constructed with the assistance of college undergraduate students, will be available to the general public as well as to the scientific community, for purposes of education and research. Outreach activities are conducted to promote participation of K-12 and undergraduate students in science research.Understanding plant development is crucial for efforts of manipulating plant growth and yield. Phytohormones are essential regulators of plant growth and responses to the environment. This project uses recent technologies of high-throughput mass spectrometry and gene expression to generate quantitative outputs and define essential crosstalk relationships between the different hormonal pathways in tomato. The context of the study has a focus on fruit development. This research provides important insight on hormonal crosstalk and is likely to predict known as well as yet unidentified hormonal interactions. Such interactions may form the basis of future efforts for the development of synthetic hormonal networks with different functionalities. With the use of synthetic fine-tuning of plant growth, advanced crops with increased yield are possible. In addition, this project generates metabolomics, genetic, molecular and bioinformatics tools that will be available to the scientific community. These tools are expected to greatly contribute to the understanding of phytohormone regulation of other aspects of plant physiology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.