The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. J. Matthew Watson to work with Dr. Karel Riha at the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology, in Vienna, Austria.
Global climactic change is expected to challenge the world's organisms with new extremes in their environments. Plants, because of their inability to leave their current environment, must adapt to their new environmental extremes or die. Many studies have borne out the abilities of plants to respond to changes in climate, both in the short-term by physiological changes but also through adaptation by genetic and epigenetic changes. A major barrier to genetic rearrangements is telomeres, the physical ends of eukaryotic chromosomes. Telomeres serve to overcome the end-replication problem, and prevent the chromosome ends from being recognized as DNA double strand breaks. Increases in abiotic stress in humans have been linked to a decrease in the total length of the telomere when compared with age-matched controls, suggesting that an increase in stress may abrogate the ability of telomeres to protect the end of the chromosome. Furthermore, the environmental extremes predicted to occur in response to global warming have been shown to disrupt telomere function. The applicant hypothesizes that chronic exposure of Arabidopsis thaliana to some of the stresses proposed to be caused by global warming will result in changes in telomere structure and abrogation of telomere function. Loss of function will be evidenced by an increase in telomere recombination and an increase in the number of telomere fusions, leading to genomic instability. A seven lab consortium is beginning a systematic study of the genetic and epigenetic changes that occur in Arabidopsis in response to acute and chronic stress. As a small part of this study, the effect of these stressors on telomeres will be integrated with global changes in the plant's genome and epigenome, with the eventual goal of determining the molecular pathways that lead from stress response to telomere dysfunction.
