This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
0930909 Doty
Microorganisms that live within plants (endophytes) can dramatically enhance plant growth by increasing resistance to pathogens and stress, providing fixed nitrogen, solubilizing phosphate, producing plant hormones, and assisting in detoxification of environmental pollutants. Poplar and willow are fast-growing trees that are used for the production of paper, lumber, and bioenergy, for carbon sequestration, and for phytoremediation of pollutants. The PIs have demonstrated that when some of the endophytes are added to sterile plants or seedlings, the growth of the plants is significantly increased. In this proposal, they aim to test the effectiveness of adding nitrogen-fixing endophytes to poplar grown in greenhouse conditions and on a field site at the UW Center for Sustainable Forestry. If these results are demonstrated in these large-scale experiments, this research could provide the means of increasing the growth of this important bioenergy crop in an inexpensive, environmentally-sustainable manner.
The intellectual merits of the proposal include the first study of nitrogen-fixing endophytes for sustainable production of a bioenergy tree species. Since many of the poplar and willow endophytes isolated so far can both induce rapid root growth and fix atmospheric nitrogen, the presence of these endophytes may have a vital role in the survival and successful establishment of these tree species in poor soils. Since the poplar genome was recently sequenced and microarrays are now available, the proposed study into the functions of diazotrophic endophytes on a whole-tree scale will provide more incentive for future molecular plant-microbe interaction experiments to be conducted. In addition, this project provides an excellent opportunity to study the effects of chemical composition of poplar trees induced by different nutrient regimes on hydrolysability and fermentability of pretreated biomass during the bioconversion to ethanol process.
The broader impacts resulting from the proposed activity include a strong emphasis on education and support for women in science. The Principal Investigator and 7 of her 9 lab members are female scientists, including one post-doc, 4 graduate students, and 2 undergraduates. The Doty Lab is ethnically diverse including Indian, Chinese, Bosnian, Korean, and Hispanic personnel. This project would initiate new collaborations with three other faculty members in the College of Forest Resources, Greg Ettl, Director of the Center for Sustainable Forestry, Soo-Hyung Kim, specializing in plant physiology and Renata Bura, specializing in bioconversion of lignocellulosic biomass to ethanol. To further increase the ethnic diversity in our programs, the PIs will seek undergraduate researchers through the UW Minority Program. The UW Undergraduate Research Program provides a forum for students to present their research at the University, and financial assistance to present their data at scientific conferences. As an active member of the International Poplar Commission, Dr. Doty has direct connections to users of poplar and willow around the world to insure that the knowledge generated in this project will be utilized promptly to increase plantation tree growth without harm to the environment. Dr. Doty is collaborating with Brian Stanton, president of GreenWood Resources, who would be willing to use endophytes as a way to increase poplar growth in his plantations. Therefore, this research could have direct impacts on poplar growth for a variety of applications including pulp production and bioenergy.
