Plant stress tolerance is a highly valued trait given the demands for producing crops for food and fuel under all kinds of environmental conditions, particularly those exacerbated by climate change. The goal of this project is to better understand the mechanism by which plants perceive adverse environmental conditions and how they protect themselves from the stress caused by these conditions. This project will focus on two factors called transcription factors that "turn on" the expression of stress response genes. These transcription factors are unusual in that they are "dormant" and attached to membranes in the cytoplasm of plant cells under normal conditions, but are activated and released from the membranes and enter the nucleus under stress conditions. The two transcription factors are activated by different stresses -- one by heat and the other by salt stress -- and each turns on a different set of genes. The investigators will determine how the factors are activated, how they distinguish different stresses and how they are relocated from one compartment of the cell to another. The factors turn on different sets of genes, and so the investigators will also examine how the factors selectively activate different target genes. This system represents a newly discovered stress response pathway in plants and has prospects for manipulating plants to achieve greater stress tolerance. The project will also provide the opportunity to train George Washington Carver interns in the area of plant stress research.
