Genomics of temperature response in plants. Climate change is predicted to have negative impacts on Australian agriculture. This project will use genomic tools to uncover biological mechanisms for plant response to temperature that will help design crop varieties that are more tolerant to higher temperatures.
Functional analysis of alternative splicing in plants. Higher temperatures affect flowering and seed set in plants. How plants sense and respond to temperature is currently unclear. Here we study alternative splicing, one of the processes affected by temperature. These studies will advance our knowledge and help develop crops that can withstand negative effects of climate change.
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE120101706
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$375,000.00
Summary
Worth its salt: advancing knowledge of salinity tolerance with mangroves as a model system. This project aims to understand how salinity tolerance is achieved in mangroves, which are highly salt tolerant plants. Using a combination of physiological and gene expression technologies the project will measure the response of mangroves to elevated salinity and atmospheric carbon dioxide, contributing to the development of salt tolerant next generation crops.
Mediator: a new concept for controlled gene expression in plant biotechnology. The Mediator protein complex is a new control point for the activation of all genes in higher organisms and the purpose of this project is to understand how three Mediator subunits regulate disease resistance in plants. The outcomes provide a new concept to direct natural gene expression towards robust crop plants able to cope with climatic variations.