Integrative modeling to investigate the multi-scale regulation of crop response to genetic and environmental perturbations.

A critical problem facing crop science today is determining and predicting the effects of environmental stress on important plant traits. Nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) is an important crop trait defined as the ratio between the amount of N fertilizer removed from the field by a crop and the amount of N fertilizer applied. Currently, major crops in managed systems only take up 30-50% of the applied N fertilizer, and the rest is lost to evaporation and leaching leading to both air and water pollution. Recent studies have shown that crop NUE will decline even further due to factors associated with global climate change such as higher temperatures and atmospheric CO2 and extremes in water availability (drought and floods). To fully understand and manage environmental impacts on NUE and other important crop traits such as biomass and yield, integrative approaches are needed to identify the underlying genetics contributing to NUE and explore the molecular mechanisms by which it is regulated. To address these questions and better understand how plant genotype translates to observed molecular phenotypes and traits, I apply a systems biology approach to explore two distinct but connected focus areas:

1. cross-communication among signaling pathways; and
2. integrative and multiscale modeling to analyze gene-by-environment interactions.