Stress tolerance in sorghum

CASE Studentship on Stress tolerance in Sorgum Heat and drought resistance are highly desirable traits in crops grown in warm climates. The introduction of western crops, such as Maize, into India and Africa has brought with it some complications which need addressing to overcome the challenges of Food Security. It is now becoming clear that problems are arising with a lack of heat and drought resistance in maize and possible linkage of the crop with an increase in diabetes. To overcome this we aim to discover the genes and proteins , endogenously present in Sorgum, which give drought resistance with view to incorporating them into other crop species. This research has several advantages [a] it opens the door to basic mechanism of heat and drought resistance - using a crop which is drought resistant, [b] allows one to use innovative high throughput transcriptomic and proteomic studies to apply a systems approach to the signalling and response pathways and [c] enables one to select candidate genes which could enhance drought resistance by gene transfer. We will use 'Stay green' lines of Sorgum which are highly drought resistant and compare these to less resistant lines. The lines are being made available to us from the Lab of Professor Tom Hash at ICRISAT. Unilever have an interest in addressing issues in Food Security and expertise in bioinformatics. The drought resistant lines have near isogenic partners which are not resistant and the trait is seen in both the mature plant and young seedlings. We therefore believe a study on young root material will result in the identification of the underlying genes. Project aims and objectives: 1. Define the physiological and temporal responses of 'stay green' and wild type Sorgum roots to drought stress. Here we aim to develop a system using a growth medium - like vermuculite which can be easily removed to give whole root systems for analyses. 2. Isolate mRNA from defined stages of drought stress and perform transcriptomic analysis using 454 and Illumina sequencing platforms. 3. To try and identify transcriptional regulatory factors we will isolate nuclei from drought stressed plants and perform proteomic studies on differential protein expression. 4. Access to QTL markers which are currently being sequenced in Hyderbad and Cornell University should help identify potential transcription factors which are present in the DNA sequences derived from QTLs. 5. Gene transfer experiments will be used to test the importance of selected genes in drought tolerance.