Professor Diane Bassham (left), Walter E. and Helen Parke Loomis Professor of Plant Physiology, was awarded $213,765 for the first year of a two-year sponsored funding award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in support of her research project entitled, “Autophagy and ER stress in plants.”  GDCB Professor Stephen Howell  (right) is a Co-Principal Investigator on this grant.  This is a continuing grant which has been approved on scientific and technical merit.

Dr. Bassham and her research team will study the relationship between two pathways required for stress tolerance in plants, autophagy and the unfolded protein response.  Tolerance of changing environmental conditions is critical for plant growth and survival as they are unable to seek refuge from the environment. A key unresolved issue is how plants adapt their cellular functions to respond to stress conditions such as heat and drought. Two pathways required for stress tolerance are autophagy, in which damaged cell components are broken down and recycled, and the unfolded protein response, in which misfolded proteins activate the expression of genes that mitigate stress damage. In this project, the relationship between these two pathways will be examined. Additional proteins that are required for the regulation of both of these pathways will be identified and their functions analyzed by a combination of biochemical, cell biology and genetic approaches. The mechanism by which cells select substrates for recycling by autophagy will also be determined. This will provide insight into how plants sense adverse environmental conditions, how stress response pathways are then activated and how different responses work together to produce stress tolerance.

The results of this project could provide information leading to the production of stress tolerant varieties of agriculturally important plants. In addition, the results of the research will be incorporated into a module of the Meta!Blast educational video game to help undergraduate and high school students learn cell biology.