Plants are essential for human life, providing food, fiber and a multitude of chemicals used in medicine and other aspects of our everyday life. Phytohormones are chemicals produced by plants to control plant physiology. This research applies recent technologies to simultaneously measure the levels of several types of phytohormones during plant development. In addition, levels of phytohormone-regulated gene expression are assessed and the resulting data are used to determine how these molecules work together to orchestrate plant growth. Results from this research provide essential knowledge for cultivating the future generation of advanced crop varieties with increased productivity and environmental stress tolerance. In addition, this research generates the first Hormonal Atlas of a plant species. This Hormonal Atlas, constructed with the assistance of college undergraduate students, will be available to the general public as well as to the scientific community, for purposes of education and research. Outreach activities are conducted to promote participation of K-12 and undergraduate students in science research.
Understanding plant development is crucial for efforts of manipulating plant growth and yield. Phytohormones are essential regulators of plant growth and responses to the environment. This project uses recent technologies of high-throughput mass spectrometry and gene expression to generate quantitative outputs and define essential crosstalk relationships between the different hormonal pathways in tomato. The context of the study has a focus on fruit development. This research provides important insight on hormonal crosstalk and is likely to predict known as well as yet unidentified hormonal interactions. Such interactions may form the basis of future efforts for the development of synthetic hormonal networks with different functionalities. With the use of synthetic fine-tuning of plant growth, advanced crops with increased yield are possible. In addition, this project generates metabolomics, genetic, molecular and bioinformatics tools that will be available to the scientific community. These tools are expected to greatly contribute to the understanding of phytohormone regulation of other aspects of plant physiology.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
