RUI: Alternative splicing in the regulation of plant innate immunity

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Plant diseases threaten crop yield and lead to billions of dollars of losses each year worldwide. RNA alternative splicing is a conserved mechanism to increase the diversity of transcripts and protein functions, and has been implicated in plant defense against pathogens. This project will elucidate the molecular basis governing the interplay between RNA alternative splicing and plant defense. This will contribute to the current understanding of plant defense mechanisms and eventually facilitate developing strategies to improve crop plants with better balanced growth and defense, and ultimately with higher productivity. This project will be used as a platform to engage undergraduate students, K-12 teachers and high school students from rural WNY, including the Native American population, in a series of STEM career readiness training exercises in the summer that can be replicated at other undergraduate institutions. Some research components of this project will be integrated in classroom teaching and laboratory investigations. Throughout the courses, students will practice critical thinking, proposal writing and professional presentations. Exercises will be provided to enhance resource and data management skills in students. This project aims to provide students a first-hand experience and to increase their competencies for future careers in the STEM fields. Teaching materials developed in this project will be made available for others to adapt and/or adopt.Strong evidence from the preliminary work indicates that a splicing regulator, SR45, acts as a suppressor of innate immunity in Arabidopsis. This project aims to elucidate how SR45, regulates plant innate immunity, a novel role of the gene that has never been characterized before. To achieve this goal, the following objectives are proposed: (1) to investigate how SR45 affects plant innate immunity in response to a variety of pathogen species using genetics approach and a suite of defense assays; (2) to confirm and characterize the involvement of putative alternatively spliced SR45-associated transcripts in plant immune response using molecular and genetic approaches; (3) to identify new pathogen-induced and SR45-dependent alternative splicing events in plant immune responses using RNA-seq with pathogen-infected inducible SR45 silencing line leaf samples and mock-treated leaf and the non-silencing line as control.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.