This award will provide supplementary support to enable Dr. David Wing, presently a post-doc at the Max-Planck Institut fur Zuchtungsforschung, to conduct collaborative research for nine months with Dr. Akira Kato of the National Institute of Agrobiological Resources in Tsukuba, Japan. They will investigate the response to heat shock at the cellular level in rice plants, with the ultimate goal of using genetic engineering to increase the resistance of such plants to the stress of such shock. Heat shock response, which exists to protect all living organisms, is characterized by the generation of special heat shock proteins upon stimulus from special heat shock genes. In this work, an attempt will be made to determine which cells in the rice plant are protected by these genes, and which are sensitive to heat stress. A special "reporter" gene which can be induced by heat stress will be introduced into the rice plants to localize the heat stress genes. Dr. Kato is an expert on the generation to transformed rice plants, and will help to produce the specially marked rice plants. Dr. Wing has also previously performed extensive related work on the genetic expression of chalcone synthase in tabacco, in collaboration with Dr. Kato.
