Photoreceptor Engineering to Modulate Plant Growth

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Light is critical for coordinating plant growth and development. Blue light (320-500 nm) in particular acts to regulate a wide range of responses that serve to promote growth. These processes include chloroplast relocation movements, leaf positioning and expansion, stomatal opening and phototropism, all of which influence a plant's photosynthetic competence by improving efficiency of light capture, reducing photodamage, and regulating gas exchange between leaves and the atmosphere. Collectively, these responses elicit dramatic effects on plant growth and are controlled by phototropin blue-light receptors. Therefore, manipulation of phototropin receptor activity offers additional opportunities to increase photosynthetic performance and promote growth under specific light conditions. Indeed, our recent results demonstrate the potential to alter plant growth through changes in phototropin reactivity. Hence, a major outcome of this work will be to establish a structural and functional blueprint for constructing engineered photoreceptors directed at optimising photosynthetic productivity under specific light conditions. This proposal therefore offers an additional approach to coordinate stepwise enhancements in photosynthetic performance with an aim to increasing yield that should ultimately offer new strategies to grow crops more efficiently. The work outlined in this proposal will also generate new photoreceptor components with tailored photochemical properties that will have utility in generating synthetic protein-based switches designed to regulate target cellular activities by light.