CAREER:Dissecting the Impact of High Temperature on Clock Function and Clock-Controlled Growth Processes in Plants

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Understanding how plants respond to variable environmental temperatures requires a comprehensive understanding of the underlying regulatory pathways. Coordination between important biological processes and external signals is communicated by the circadian clock. The circadian clock is an internal timekeeping machinery that enhances fitness and is found ubiquitously in bacteria, plants, fungi and animals. Both temperature and the clock affect fundamental processes such as growth in plants. For example, crop productivity is affected by even modest temperature increases, depending on the time of day. Through identification of new temperature regulators of clock function or links to clock-controlled growth responses, the project seeks to uncover novel mechanistic insights into how temperature impacts the clock, growth, and resilience. Therefore, the goal of this research is to understand how extreme temperature impacts clock function and growth in plants. Integrated within this proposal is a 10-week summer research class followed by mentor-guided research experiences to promote recruitment and retention of transfer community college students that are members of under-represented minority groups. This module is designed to train and retain transfer students for advanced education and careers in agriculture. The mentored research experience will fill an existing need for research opportunities for under-represented transfer students at the University of California-Riverside. Through interactions in the lab, students will develop a sense of community, along with purpose and professional connections. Completion of this research will have a broad impact on our understanding of the dynamic nature of plant genomes in response to stress and a positive impact on the US workforce and ultimately global food security.Although massive genome reorganization occurs in response to heat stress in plants, the underlying mechanisms involved are not known. The overall hypothesis to be tested is that plant survival under heat stress is directly dependent on the time of day, and that multiple transcriptional regulators are responsible for integrating temperature signals to the clock to modulate timed responses. This project aims to 1) Characterize the role of Heat Shock Factors on clock function under high temperature, 2) Investigate how clock-controlled heat stress responses impinge upon growth-related processes, and 3) Determine how heat stress impacts translation of key clock and clock-controlled genes. The short-term broader impacts of this project will be to increase knowledge of the dynamic nature of plant interaction with the environment, and provide a pipeline for recruitment and retention of under-represented community college transfer students in plant sciences. Students will receive training in molecular biology techniques, genetics, genomics, and bioinformatics approaches, mentoring and teaching, critical thinking skills, and career development through publications and presentations. These skills provide an advantage for admission to competitive graduate programs in STEM or help them to secure research jobs in academic labs or biotech companies of their choice. In the long term, the results will increase understanding of the dynamics of the clock and environmental temperature and the impact on an organism’s behavior and physiology. In addition, the results could contribute to engineering next-generation strategies to improve yield and stress tolerance in plants.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.