| Grant number: | 15/06260-0 |
| Support Opportunities: | Program for Research on Bioenergy (BIOEN) - Regular Program Grants |
| Start date: | December 01, 2015 |
| End date: | May 31, 2018 |
| Field of knowledge: | Biological Sciences - Biochemistry - Molecular Biology |
| Principal Investigator: | Carlos Takeshi Hotta |
| Grantee: | Carlos Takeshi Hotta |
| Host Institution: | Instituto de Química (IQ). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil |
Abstract
The aim of this project is to characterize the circadian clock in different organs and tissues in C4 grasses and investigate their interaction. As secondary aims, we will characterize diurnal and circadian rhythms in the mesophyl and bundle sheath cells in sugarcane and Setaria viridis; characterize the differences between the circadian clocks in the leaves and the internodes of sugarcane; and investigate long-distance signaling between the leaf circadian clock and the internode circadian clocks. The circadian clock is a signaling pathway that encodes the time of the day. The circadian clock is made of multiple transcription factors that auto-regulate their expression, originating multiple interlocked feedback loops. The circadian clock optimizes the plant interactions with rhythmic environmental events. Arabidopsis thaliana with changes in their circadian clock accumulate less biomass, have less chlorophyll, and have reduced water use efficiency. One of the major challenges in the subject is to fully understand how the circadian clock enhances the plant productivity. An emerging role in the field is the characterization of tissue-specific circadian clocks. It was believed that the plant circadian clocks inside each cells were independent from the others. However, recent studies have suggested a different view: not only were the circadian clocks at the mesophyl different from the circadian clocks at the vascular tissue, but they were regulate by it as well. In the face of this new paradigm, with specialized tissue-specific circadian clocks that communicate and regulate each other, three questions arise: a) What is the nature of the difference between each circadian clock?, b) How the different circadian clocks communicate with each other? C) How tissue-specific circadian clocks increase the productivity of a plant? In our group, we believe that the sugarcane, and other C4 plants, can be a good biological model to answer these questions. (AU)
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