IDENTIFICATION OF METABOLIC, MORPHOLOGICAL, AND PHYSIOLOGICAL FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE SORGHUM WHOLE?PLANT PRE-FLOWERING DROUGHT

Our overarching goal is to understand the fundamental mechanisms that confer tolerance to drought and to develop crops with enhanced tolerance. We will develop systems-level knowledge that integrates molecular data, metabolic fluxes, and physiological traits that mediate plant growth and development in above and below ground tissues in sorghum that exhibits considerable genetic variation to these stresses. We hypothesize that stress modulated metabolite expression and physiological changes and are important for adaptation of sorghum to stresses and that the stress-tolerant cultivars differ from stress-sensitive cultivars in their overall systems level responses. Our objective in this proposal is to use an integrated omics network analysis to identify genes and pathways that are key factors in drought tolerance in sorghum in above ground and below ground tissues. To achieve our overall objective, we propose the following specific aims:Specific Aim 1: Determine above and below ground effects of pre-flowering drought stress on subset of the USDA Sorghum Core Collection for drought tolerance.Specific Aim 2: Develop systems-level networks and an integrative multiscale model that explain relationships between sorghum carbon flux to drought on a sorghum diversity panel.Specific Aim 3: Distribution of these results to a broad audience