Investigate the Molecular Basis of Crosstalk between the Circadian Clock and Innate Immunity in Arabidopsis

病原体引起的疾病在世界范围内造成巨大的经济损失。使用化学品和杀虫剂控制植物病害有可能对环境和人类健康造成附带损害。因此，了解植物如何对抗病原体并随后利用这些信息来控制植物对破坏性疾病的抗性是很重要的。在病原体的频繁挑战下，植物在一天中的不同时间激活不同的防御反应，这一过程最近被证明是由内源性生物计时器生物钟控制的。生物钟将时间信息与环境刺激（如病原体感染）结合起来，调节许多生物过程，包括植物防御反应。研究人员先前证明，植物防御状态的变化可能会影响生物钟活动。然而，植物的防御反应和生物钟活动是如何共同调节的尚不清楚。该项目旨在深入了解协调生物钟与防御反应的机制。重要的是，该项目为学生，特别是妇女、代表性不足的少数民族学生和K-12科学教师提供了良好的培训机会。参与该项目的学生和博士后将接受生物学和生物信息学方面的广泛培训，以便为未来的科学事业做好更好的准备。研究经验也将提供给巴尔的摩地区表现不佳的公立学校的K-12教师。科学教师是将课堂上获得的知识与实验室进行的研究联系起来的关键。将提供的研究经验将使他们能够为他们的班级设计更有效的科学课程。这个合作项目的目标是了解先天免疫控制与拟南芥生物钟之间的相互作用。具体来说，该项目旨在识别和表征控制防御和/或时钟活动的基因，并阐明这些基因如何共同作用以协调拟南芥的抗病、生长和发育。为了实现这一目标，一个由植物防御、生物钟和系统生物学领域的专家组成的团队将采用传统的分子、遗传和生化方法以及计算建模来实现所提出的活动。本研究获得的信息将增强我们对植物抗病性、生长发育的基础知识。从这项研究中鉴定的基因可以作为分子工具，从遗传上操纵重要经济作物的抗病性状。这些植物将减少我们对化学品和农药的依赖，从而保护环境和人类健康，支持可持续农业。

Pathogen-induced diseases lead to tremendous economic loss worldwide. The use of chemicals and pesticides to control plant diseases risks collateral damage to the environment and human health. Therefore it is important to understand how plants fight against pathogens and subsequently to use such information to control plant resistance to devastating diseases. Upon frequent challenges imposed by pathogens, plants activate different defense responses at different times of a day, a process recently shown to be controlled by the endogenous biological timekeeper called the circadian clock. The circadian clock integrates temporal information with environmental stimuli (such as pathogen infections) to regulate many biological processes, including plant defense responses. The investigators previously demonstrated that changes in plant defense status could affect clock activity. However how defense responses and clock activity are co-regulated in plants remains unclear. This project seeks insights into the mechanisms that coordinate the circadian clock with defense responses. Importantly, this project provides excellent training opportunities to students, especially women, underrepresented minority students and K-12 science teachers. Students and postdocs involved in this project will be broadly trained in biology and bioinformatics so as to be better prepared for future careers in science. Research experiences will also be provided to K-12 teachers from low performing public schools in the Baltimore area. Science teachers are the key to making connections between knowledge acquired in the classroom and research conducted in the laboratory. The research experience that will be provided will enable them to design a more effective science curriculum for their classes.The goal of this collaborative project is to understand the interplay between the controls of innate immunity and the circadian clock in Arabidopsis. Specifically the project seeks to identify and characterize genes that control defense and/or clock activities and elucidate how these genes act together to orchestrate disease resistance, growth, and development of Arabidopsis. To address this goal, a team of experts in plant defense, circadian clock, and systems biology fields will employ traditional molecular, genetic and biochemical approaches as well as computational modeling to implement the proposed activities. Information obtained from this study will enhance our fundamental knowledge about disease resistance, growth and development of plants. Genes identified from this study can be used as molecular tools to genetically manipulate disease resistance traits in economically important crop plants. Such plants will reduce our dependency on chemicals and pesticides, thus protecting the environment and human health and supporting sustainable agriculture.