Iowa State University professor and researcher Michelle Guo is researching a specific plant gene in order to try and make plants more resilient under stress. (Photo by Brooklyn Draisey/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
An Iowa State University researcher has received national support to take a deeper dive into a gene that helps plants thrive and survive in the face of environmental threats, with the goal of creating more resilient crops to feed the world.
Michelle Guo, an assistant professor of genetics, development and cell biology at ISU, has spent almost 20 years researching a gene found in plants called Feronia, which impacts many different plant functions and processes. Now, with an almost $2 million grant, Guo and her fellow researchers are looking at the gene in different cell types to try and shut down certain functions while keeping others.
The gene has a hand in ensuring plants both grow well and can protect themselves from stress, Guo said. For example, removing or disrupting the gene creates what she called a “dwarf plant,” and the plant would also become more sensitive to things like salt, which would impact its growth.
“This gene really provides a window to look inside the plants and really try to understand that plant growth and stress balance so we can figure out something that might be important (in order) to design, for example, breeding schemes to make more resilient crop plants,” Guo said.
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Guo received a five-year, $1.8 million grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in order to support her research. The grant, called Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award for Early Stage Investigators (MIRA), doesn’t fund a specific project or area of study, but rather funds Guo directly, so she can utilize the award however she needs.
“I can do a lot of things with it, and that freedom is really, it’s great, remarkable,” Guo said. “It also means that the students and postdocs in the lab, they can also pursue exciting directions if they have some great ideas, so the money can support them because it’s not limited.”
Feronia has “been in the public eye” for about 20 years and Guo been researching it for nearly that long alongside other groups. She said she hopes other researchers are approaching the work from different angles so they could eventually inform other people’s research.
The conventional method of learning what goes on inside of a plant involves mashing the whole thing together and comparing it with a different plant, Guo said, but that could potentially cause scientists to miss important information. With the aid of the grant, the team is instead using single cell RNA sequencing to study the gene in the different kinds of cells that make up plants.
Using roots of the arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress, Guo and her team are working to disrupt the gene partially, rather than entirely, to see how the plant fares. The plant’s root has the Feronia gene in different cell types, which she said opened a world of possibilities to study the gene’s functions in different areas and, eventually, maybe engineer plants to grow better in worse conditions using this knowledge.
Guo conducts her work with graduate and undergraduate students and in partnership with California Institute of Technology assistant professor Trevor Nolan, also an ISU alum.
Outside of the research itself, Guo said she will be using grant dollars to expand outreach efforts, both on and off campus. One group she will encourage to come check out the lab and their work is undergraduates, in order to expose them to real-life research earlier and find those who might want to get involved.
Guo will also recruit high school science teachers to come help conduct research through a summer program the university offers, where they will be able to work in the lab. From working with both groups before, Guo said younger students and high school teachers bring a lot of curiosity to the lab and often ask questions she hadn’t thought to consider.
“If you work in the lab for too long, some of the questions you forget to ask, but they bring the fresh eyes, fresh ideas, and those are great,” Guo said.
She said she will also develop a class for undergraduate students, mostly freshmen, to teach them about research and lab techniques.
With the effects of climate change becoming more and more apparent, Guo said it’s more important than ever that crops become able to produce large yields even when they’re in less-than-ideal conditions. Creating a more food-secure world is the ultimate goal behind this research, along with helping young scientists further their careers by completing and publishing their work on this important subject.
“It takes a lot of time for plants to evolve if we just leave them alone, and their learning curve is not that steep, right?” Guo said. “So we need to really facilitate that process … to understand how plants respond to this and figure out something to try to engineer plants, help them to adjust to this climate change that’s happening more often.”
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