Photoreceptor Engineering to Modulate Plant Growth

光对于协调植物生长和发育至关重要。蓝光（320-500 nm）特别用于调节促进生长的各种反应。这些过程包括叶绿体移位运动、叶片定位和扩展、气孔开放和向光性，所有这些都通过提高光捕获效率、减少光损伤和调节叶片与大气之间的气体交换来影响植物的光合能力。总的来说，这些反应引起植物生长的显着影响，并通过向光素蓝光受体控制。因此，操纵趋光素受体活性提供了额外的机会，以增加光合性能和促进特定光条件下的生长。事实上，我们最近的研究结果表明，有可能改变植物的生长，通过光向生素反应的变化。因此，这项工作的主要成果将是建立一个结构和功能的蓝图，用于构建工程光感受器，以优化特定光照条件下的光合生产力。因此，该提议提供了一种额外的方法来协调光合性能的逐步增强，目的是增加产量，最终应该提供更有效地种植作物的新策略。该提案中概述的工作还将产生具有定制光化学特性的新感光器组件，这些组件将用于产生基于合成蛋白质的开关，旨在通过光调节靶细胞活动。

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.