This award supports research to study plant adaptation to abiotic stress, focusing on highland barley. Plant stress from non-living factors in the environment such as extreme temperatures or drought causes immense yield decreases. Understanding how plants deal with and adapt to such stress will be essential to maintaining the world's food supply. Barley is a good system to study the mechanisms underlying stress tolerance. Since its domestication, barley cultivation has spread to almost every continent. Along the way, breeders have selected varieties that are best suited for their local regions, particularly with regard to local stresses. There has been strong evidence that the highland of China and neighboring Tibet are a site of domestication for barley and varieties from that region provide a different snapshot of alleles that may have emerged from domestication. This grant will study the adaptations of local varieties of barley from the highlands of China and Tibet compared to other, lowland barleys. The research work will be conducted under the mentorship of Dr. Jia Li at Lanzhou University in China. Dr. Li is an expert in the field of highland barleys, and his lab, being in the native habitat, is situated perfectly to study these adaptations in the native barley.
The Tibetan plateau has recently been characterized as a second center of barley domestication and therefore represents a different snapshot of alleles that may have emerged from the bottleneck that occurs with domestication. However, few studies have been performed using landraces from this region. The aim of this study is to compare barley landraces, which come from this independent domestication event, with those grown more broadly, in order to identify sequence and expression differences that impart differential stress tolerance. The ultimate goal is to understand the mechanism of that tolerance, and to disseminate that knowledge for future agricultural improvements. Mentorship and on-site experiments at the Li lab will be very important for the progress of this research. Dr. Li's team has experience with studying highland barleys, and has done some preliminary RNA-seq experiments on this crop. This NSF EAPSI award supports research by a U.S. graduate student and is funded in collaboration with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.
