The functional organization and control of plant carbohydrate and phosphate metabolism

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'Metabolism' refers to all of the enzyme catalyzed chemical reactions occurring in a cell at any given time. Understanding the organization and control of cellular metabolism is of great importance to mankind as it has crucial applications to: i) elucidating and ultimately solving many problems in human health and disease arising from 'metabolic disorders', & ii) the effective biotechnological application of recombinant DNA technology for creating 'improved' animals, plants, and microbes via 'rationale metabolic engineering'. Plant metabolic engineering is playing a pivotal role in the creation of stress tolerant crops for increasing sustainable food production for the world's rapidly expanding population (while conserving precious resources such as fresh water), as well as recycling atmospheric carbon dioxide into renewable biofuels and energy sources, and a host of industrial feed-stocks. My research program seeks to identify the functional organization and control of plant carbohydrate and phosphate metabolism. This is approached by thoroughly characterizing the molecular, regulatory, and functional properties of key enzymes controlling: i) carbon partitioning to important storage end-products (starch, oil, & protein) in developing seeds, & ii) acquisition of inorganic phosphate, a crucial but environmentally limiting macronutrient needed for crop growth and development. Our studies have significant applications to problems in Canadian agriculture and environmental protection including the: i) targeted modification of storage oil vs. protein levels in our major oilseed crops such as canola and soybean, and ii) development of phosphate-use efficient crops, urgently needed to reduce mankind's rampant but highly inefficient use of non-renewable, unsustainable, polluting, and expensive phosphate fertilizers. During this granting period my HQP will continue to integrate innovative proteomic, genomic, and cell biology tools into our research. These advances require constant retooling, training, and optimization, but provide quantitative improvements in the types of hypotheses that we can test, and a solid foundation for HQP training in modern plant metabolic biochemistry.