The role of RNA structures in plant response to temperature

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Global warming has the potential to widely suppress agricultural yields. One of the effects of global warming is an increased occurrence of temperature extremes and these are particularly destructive of our crop plants. According to the global annual agriculture report, agricultural yields will drop by up to 20% by the year 2050 due to global climate change. Previous studies have also shown grain yield declines by 10% for each 1 degree increase. Thus, in order to avoid severe food crises caused by global warming, it is important to adapt our crop plants to withstand extreme temperature changes. My proposed research is to understand how plants respond to temperature extremes and how to regulate this response to make plants more adaptable to climate change.Most previous scientific studies have focused on gene regulation at the DNA level, however, regulation at this level is neither particularly rapid, nor does it correlate well with protein levels, which are the key output for gene regulation. My proposed research is to explore how the regulation of gene expression occurs at the RNA level, which can be rapid and more directly correlated with protein levels. RNA, in contrast to DNA, is very flexible and more responsive to different cellular conditions, in particular varying temperature. For instance, RNA forms more base pairing structures under cold conditions, while maintaining single strandedness at higher temperatures. These changes in RNA structure will have differing effects on a range of processes that control protein levels, such as ribosome binding, RNA processing and RNA stability. By taking advantage of this flexibility in RNA structure, plants can adapt to different temperature conditions quickly and reversibly via changes in protein level. My proposed research is to explore RNA structures at specific temperatures to realize modalities of gene regulation controlled by shifts in RNA structure. My previous work has developed a novel and powerful platform to measure in vivo RNA structures with high resolution over more than 10,000 genes. My proposed research is to compare the differences in global RNA structure under different temperature conditions. This will allow me to identify RNAs with different temperature-controlled structures that may directly regulate gene expression, putative RNA thermometers. My proposed research will open up a novel methodology for the study of gene regulation in plants. This methodology can also be applied to other abiotic stresses such as drought stress, mechanic stress, water stress, etc., as well as biotic stresses. A user-friendly web-based server of a corresponding bioinformatics toolkit will be established in my proposed research for analyzing, predicting and visualizing individual RNA structures of interest.