Heat stress impairs plant growth and reduces crop yield. In nature, temperature and day length are linked together; longer days tend to have higher temperatures than shorter days. Little is known about how photosynthetic organisms regulate and integrate their responses to high temperature and day length to optimize growth. The team will use green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii to investigate the responses to heat stress and day length, as well as their interactions in photosynthetic cells. The information will help engineer algal strains and crops that can tolerate changing temperatures and day lengths in the field, with ultimate goal to increase biomass production and agricultural yield.
Proposer: Ru Zhang, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center
Proposal: High-throughput sequencing and metabolomics enabled phenomics to investigate integration of heat and circadian responses in the model green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii