Location

University of Nevada Las Vegas, Science and Education Building

Start Date

9-8-2011 10:15 AM

End Date

9-8-2011 12:00 PM

Description

The current water shortage is a major concern in regard to our global climate change crisis. A decrease in the availability of water will have direct effects on the development of plants. Some crops, such as Oryza sativa, or commonly known as rice, requires an abundant amount of water for adequate growth. With the water shortage crisis, it will become extremely difficult to harvest such crops to meet the world’s food demand. However, many plants have evolved mechanisms for overcoming and tolerating stresses such as drought. My research focuses on studying the proteins involved with these mechanisms. The WRKY superfamily is a family of transcription factors that up or down-regulate pathways in response to biotic and abiotic stresses in plants. We propose and hypothesize that OsWRKY70 plays a role in the abiotic stress of drought in rice. To identify the physiological role of this gene, we studied the phenotype of OsWRKY70 knockout mutants using an insertional transposon in comparison to its wildtype counterparts. This project aims to study the proteins involved with drought resistance in rice, which will pave the way for the production of genetically engineered crops that will be better at conserving water.

Keywords

Crops—Drought tolerance; Droughts; Global warming; Rice — Drought tolerance; Transgenic plants

Disciplines

Agricultural Science | Biochemistry | Genetics and Genomics | Plant Breeding and Genetics

Language

English

Comments

Research sponsored by: NSF EPSCoR Grant # EPS0814372


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Aug 9th, 10:15 AM Aug 9th, 12:00 PM

The Role of a transcription factor in regulating rice response to drought stress

University of Nevada Las Vegas, Science and Education Building

The current water shortage is a major concern in regard to our global climate change crisis. A decrease in the availability of water will have direct effects on the development of plants. Some crops, such as Oryza sativa, or commonly known as rice, requires an abundant amount of water for adequate growth. With the water shortage crisis, it will become extremely difficult to harvest such crops to meet the world’s food demand. However, many plants have evolved mechanisms for overcoming and tolerating stresses such as drought. My research focuses on studying the proteins involved with these mechanisms. The WRKY superfamily is a family of transcription factors that up or down-regulate pathways in response to biotic and abiotic stresses in plants. We propose and hypothesize that OsWRKY70 plays a role in the abiotic stress of drought in rice. To identify the physiological role of this gene, we studied the phenotype of OsWRKY70 knockout mutants using an insertional transposon in comparison to its wildtype counterparts. This project aims to study the proteins involved with drought resistance in rice, which will pave the way for the production of genetically engineered crops that will be better at conserving water.