Steven D. Clouse
Professor of Horticultural Science
(919) 515-5360
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
August 26, 2004
N.C. State scientists get $2 million grant to explore plant proteomics
RALEIGH, NC -- Two North Carolina State University professors have received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study molecular mechanisms controlling plant development. Their research could lead to new ways to regulate growth in agricultural plants, perhaps giving farmers promising applications for speeding crop production.
Dr. Steven Clouse, professor of horticultural science, and Dr. Michael B. Goshe, assistant professor of biochemistry, will collaborate with researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Oklahoma to determine the molecular properties of cell surface receptors in Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant that is widely used as a model organism in plant biology.
Recent years have seen a growing collection of bioinformatics resources for the plant, including a fully sequenced genome. The grant to Clouse and Goshe is N.C. State's first through the 2010 Project, an NSF initiative to determine the function of 25,000 genes in Arabidopsis thaliana by the year 2010.
"The biological resources for studying Arabidopsis are extensive, and that's turned Arabidopsis into the best-known plant in the world at the molecular level," says Clouse.
Clouse, Goshe and their collaborators will undertake a functional analysis and phosphorylation site mapping of 217 leucine-rich repeat receptor-like kinases in Arabidopsis. The leucine-rich repeat receptor-like kinases (LRR RLKs) are enzymes that are anchored in the cell membrane and start a chain reaction of molecular activity in response to hormones and environmental signals, which eventually leads to specific genes being turned on or off.
Studying the biochemistry of the receptors and the genes that are targeted by the 217 different LRR RLKs involved in these signaling pathways will lead to better understanding of what regulates plant growth, disease resistance and when plants begin to age. Clouse is a leading expert on brassinosteroids, plant steroid hormones that are ubiquitous in the plant kingdom and crucial for normal plant growth.
Goshe is skilled with mass spectrometry technology. He will use a technique he co-developed and expects to patent that uses novel phosphoprotein isotope-coded affinity tags to identify and measure changes in protein phosphorylation.
"Our collaborative approach benefits from Michael's biochemistry background and my molecular genetics background," says Clouse. Clouse will grow Arabidopsis under hundreds of different conditions, and then isolate all of the LRR RLKs from cell membranes. Goshe will then determine their biochemical properties using mass
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