This is a Presidential Young Investigator Award, to support an extraordinarily talented young maize geneticist. Her research interests are in the area of mitochondrial gene expression in higher plants, and she will be using mutants of maize (corn) which are affected in mitochondrial functions as materials for the genetic analysis of higher plant mitochondria. She is also interested in the interrelationship between nuclear and mitochondrial genomes, and will use interspecific hybrids to study this (e.g., hybrid corn plants carrying domestic corn (maize) nuclei and wild maize (teosintes) cytoplasms (mitochondrial genomes) to determine how these genomes affect each others' expression in the intact plant cell.
