Initiative Team Priorities - Plant Stress: Abiotic and Biotic
The Plant Stress: Abiotic and Biotic Initiative Team identified five core priorities focusing on key disciplinary issues and five over-arching priorities with additional opportunities for team building.
Core priorities include plant interactions with:
Over-arching priorities:
The Plant Stress Initiative Team Crop developed these priority areas based on reports that losses to environmental stresses are enormous. Estimates of crop losses to drought, alone, run over $1 billion per year in the U.S. with losses in 1995-1996 and 1998 reaching $5 and $6 billion, respectively. The single state of Kansas lost over $1 billion in the drought of 2002. Losses to the citrus industry from freeze damage topped $700 million in just three California counties in 1998. Heat stress causes both chronic and acute damage that is difficult to quantify, but contributes to average yields being three- to seven-fold lower than record yields. Impacts of temperature stresses on agriculture may increase over time due to the effects of global climate change. Average crop losses to insects have been estimated at 13%, while a single disease, Fusarium head blight, has caused up to $1 billion per year in losses. As a result, the need for increased resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses has been recognized as a national research priority.
The group's initial focus will be team-building and developing strategies to address priority areas. A TIP proposal examining the role of chemical chaperones on protein thermostability has the potential to be extended from heat stress to many other plant stresses that affect protein structure and function. While building on strengths in core areas, we will work toward the over-arching priorities that provide even greater opportunities for synergy. Key to these efforts will be support of enabling technologies. Core facilities, including plant growth facilities and shared research resources supporting functional genomics, proteomics and metabolomics, must be maintained at state-of-the-art levels. Our initial effort in this direction is the development of a RIP proposal to obtain key 2-D imaging capabilities.
Research thrusts that are likely to pay dividends in a number of areas involve examining common plant responses and interactions of multiple stresses. As we gain additional insight, it is becoming increasing clear that common denominators are the rule. Studies of injury mechanisms have turned up activated forms of oxygen contributing to oxidative damage in plants exposed to many different environmental stresses. The similarities between signal transduction pathways for plant acclimation to various environmental stresses are striking. Successes in elucidating transcription factors that trigger batteries of genes that combat low temperatures also hold promise for drought stress relief.
Two related approaches that lend themselves to multidisciplinary involvement are the development of model systems and the application of molecular approaches to specific targeted crops that are important to Oklahoma’s economy. The use of model systems allows researchers from a variety of disciplines to come together to solve a problem using a well characterized genome. Efforts that efficiently build on previous findings can then be ported to Oklahoma’s key crops. These approaches should provide leverage in attracting funding from commodity groups as well as from competitive sources supporting basic studies.
Team Coordinator
Jeff Anderson
360 Ag Hall
405-744-5422
Team Administrator
Dave Porter
369 Ag Hall
405-744-6130