Translational regulation and novel translated small ORFs in Arabidopsis ABA responses

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Abscisic acid (ABA) is an essential hormone regulating plant tolerance to major stressors such as drought, salinity, and extreme temperature. In anticipation of climate change and increasing demand for food, there is an urgent need to understand how ABA controls plant tolerance to stress as a first step in developing crops with greater resilience to stress. At the cellular level, plant stress responses can be controlled in various ways: DNA transcription into mRNA can be regulated, as can the translation of mRNA into proteins, which are ultimately responsible for executing the response. This project aims to discover all of the mRNAs translated into proteins that occur in the model Arabidopsis plant in response to ABA. The ultimate goal of this project is to understand the global and gene-specific regulation of transcription and translation that gives rise to plant stress tolerance. This research will have important impacts on society by providing crucial information needed to breed crop plants that better adapt to environmental stress. In addition to offering interdisciplinary training for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in genomics, bioinformatics, and plant molecular biology, this project will be integrated with undergraduate research programs and will engage the research community by organizing a workshop to teach others how to do similar research with other plants.This research will test the hypothesis that genes/transcript isoforms whose translation increases in response to ABA enhance plant tolerance to stress. Cutting-edge Ribo-seq and RNA-seq techniques, newly developed computational analyses, and advanced molecular biology tools will be applied. Specific aims include (1) the profiling of the translational dynamics of individual genes and the characterization of genes that are translationally regulated in response to ABA, (2) the investigation of the selective translation of transcript isoforms in response to ABA, and (3) the identification and characterization of novel ABA-regulated translated sORFs. Together, these results will provide comprehensive insights into posttranscriptional regulation in stress responses and enable the development of crops that more rapidly respond to and tolerate environmental stress. Workshops and training for students and post-docs will disseminate the use of Ribo-seq throughout the plant biology community.This award was co-funded by the Genetic Mechanisms Cluster in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences and the Plant Genome Research Program in the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems’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.