Development of a genome-wide enhancer map in Arabidopsis thaliana

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This project intends to develop fundamental knowledge and technology for enabling scientists to engineer plants that can be grown under a variety of environmental stresses, such as cold, heat, drought, and salt stresses. Results from this project will help plant breeders develop future crops that will adapt to environmental and climate changes. This project also seeks to integrate basic plant science research with the teaching and training of the next-generation of plant scientists. The training aspect of this project includes graduate students from underrepresented groups and the teaching component includes the development and implementation of a plant biotechnology course at Tuskegee, a university whose student population is composed primarily of underrepresented groups. Gene expression in plants is regulated by enhancers at different developmental stages and under different biotic and abiotic stresses. Enhancers act independently of the distance and orientation with respect to the promoters of target genes, which make enhancers extremely difficult to identify using traditional methods. Very few enhancers have been characterized in plant species, which is largely due to the lack of an efficient methodology for enhancer identification. This project aims to establish an enhancer identification system in model plant Arabidopsis thaliana based on chromatin signatures that are associated with enhancers. This project includes three specific goals: (1) Developing several genome-wide datasets that will be used for enhancer prediction; (2) Developing a genome-wide enhancer map in A. thaliana; (3) Isolating and validating a set of tissue-specific enhancers and enhancers activated under cold, heat, drought, and salt stresses.