NRT: Plants-3D (Discover, Design and Deploy): Training Diverse Graduate Student Cohorts in Plant Synthetic Biology

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Global food security is among the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Meeting the nutritional needs of 9 billion people by 2050 will require significant increases in crop productivity, a reduction in pest and pathogen susceptibility, and enhanced resistance to drought, salinity, flooding, temperature extremes and nutrient deficiency. Plants provide food, fiber and biomolecules used in medicine and a myriad of industries. The critical need to improve the environmental resilience of plants and the rapid growth of the plant-based chemical industry has placed high demands on workforce availability and training. Remarkably, only 3% of the biotechnology workforce is Hispanic or African-American. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to the University of California Riverside will increase the diversity and capacity of the nation's workforce in agricultural biotechnology by building upon the institution's effective model for minority and first-generation undergraduate education in STEM. The Plants3D (Discover, Design, Deploy) project will provide interdisciplinary training in plant science and engineering. The project anticipates training over fifty (50) MS and PhD students, including twenty-eight (28) funded trainees who will be cross-trained in plant science and environmental and chemical engineering. These trainees will be prepared for agricultural biotechnology careers in industry, academia and government agencies. The PLANTS3D NRT project will undertake interdisciplinary research and training to address plant science challenges related to food security and human health and to foster entrepreneurial skills. It will leverage genomic resources and the biological and engineering tools of synthetic biology to understand plant stress sensing and protective responses, plant-microbe interactions, and to increase production of high-value phytochemicals. The PLANTS3D NRT project will train graduate students to: (i) discover pathways that plants use to sense and respond to abiotic and biotic signals or produce valuable natural products; (ii) design novel signaling components that regulate stress tolerance or synthetic biology tools to efficiently transform and express optimized plant metabolic pathways; and (iii) deploy engineered stress tolerance pathways in crops or biosynthetic pathways that produce valuable metabolites in microbial hosts. PLANTS3D unites faculty experts in plant biology, synthetic biology and engineering to achieve these goals. Students will be trained in the transdisciplinary integration of knowledge and tools to create solutions and entrepreneurialism as teams to accelerate the translation of their discoveries to practical applications. Trainees will also have opportunities to intern with a variety of agricultural, biotechnology or pharmaceutical firms. The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.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.