Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
Plants need to constantly deal with fluctuating environments, and a recent grant award to two CGSB faculty members may help unlock the genetic networks that allow plants to respond to environmental changes. Drs. Michael Purugganan and Rich Bonneau were awarded a 4-year $3.65 M grant by the NSF Plant Genome Research Program to figure out the genetic networks that allow rice to respond to temperature and water availability. Parts of the project, which is in collaboration with Dr. Endang Septiningsih of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, will also involve studying how environmental genetic networks in different rice varieties and how they evolve, and developing new computational methods to scale up mathematical approaches to studying gene networks.
