Despite the diverse array of habitats that plants thrive in, mechanistic insight into the physiological processes and molecular mechanisms that ensure climate resilience have only been characterized in a small number of model plant species and crops. This is particularly evident when considering root systems, which provide many important sustainability-related functions to the plant necessary for growth under water or nutrient limiting conditions. Nevertheless, the increasing availability of complete genome sequences for a wide swath of plant species highlights the opportunities that exist to functionalize our ‘omics level understanding of plant biodiversity.
Our project will functionalize biodiversity in plants through a combination of species curation, phenomics, gene editing and comparative genomics. We will establish a database of model plants with sequenced genomes that curates the ease of cultivation under standard laboratory conditions and presents an anatomical atlas of root tips for comparative studies. We will pioneer the use of CRISPR/Cas9 as a tool for comparative developmental genetics, to understand the conserved and divergent functions of genes critical for establishing anatomical complexity in roots. These wet-bench approaches will be complemented with comparative genomics approaches that identify gene families associated with global species distributions. This functional atlas of biodiversity will provide great insight into the inner beauty of plants, establish essential community resources that facilitate the broader study of biodiverse species, inform the improvement of a larger diversity of crop plants, and inspire the preservation and continued study of the most important kingdom of life for human existence.
