Location: Crop Production and Pest Control Research
Project Number: 5020-21000-008-015-I
Project Type: Interagency Reimbursable Agreement
Start Date: Oct 1, 2019
End Date: Sep 14, 2022
Objective:
Characterize the role played by key transcription factors (TF) in regulating seed oil traits of biofuel interest.
Approach:
From the large public RNA-Seq data set in Arabidopsis we first identified all seed expression sets using an automated classifier, and then inferred a seed-specific gene regulatory network. The transcription factors (TFs) in the network were ranked by their relative influence on the lipid biosynthesis genes. Four well-known regulators of seed lipid biosynthesis were discovered ab initio in this network. In the proposed project we will build on this approach by adding a TF redundancy index to prioritize non-redundant TFs and then validate their influence on seed lipid biosynthesis via phenotypic assays and ChIP-Seq assay to find their targets. For TFs that are candidates for regulating oil biosynthesis, knock-outs and overexpressers will be constructed and seed oil quantity and quality will be measured in these lines.
