Improving seed traits by understanding and modulating transcription

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Food is a cornerstone of a stable and prosperous civilization. Most staple foods and vegetable oils come from seeds. Ensuring seed yield and quality is a pressing need because of the ongoing climate change and a growing world population. Grains and oilseeds are the most significant components of farm cash receipts in Canada. Therefore, understanding seed biology is also vital for the economy. ******My long-term goal is to improve seed quality and yield. Decades of physiological characterizations and genetic studies of seeds have generated a remarkable pool of knowledge and many significant open questions. My short-term objectives are to answer some of these questions using systems approaches. Objective 1 aims to understand how a set of core transcription factors (TFs) and transcriptional regulators (TRs) coordinate the expression of thousands of genes during seed development in a model plant species Arabidopsis thaliana. Objective 2 will address how to precisely modulate gene expression in a tissue-specific manner in seeds. Objective 3 aims to translate knowledge from Arabidopsis to canola, an essential crop in Canada, and to pinpoint discoveries immediately relevant to agriculture. The robustness of the proposed study will be safeguarded by novel experimental designs, high-throughput sequencing technologies, and efficient phenotyping setups. The work and resulting data will create an excellent platform to train HQPs with both advanced molecular and quantitative data analysis skills.