Dr. Ru Zhang
Prinicipal Investigator and Associate Member, Danforth Plant Science Centre
PI: Prof. Rob Ness
November 1, 2024
12 to 1 PM
IB 140& Zoom
Title: Understanding and Improving Heat Tolerance in Photosynthetic Cells Using the Unicellular Green Alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii
Abstract: High temperature jeopardizes plant growth, reduces crop yields, and hinders biofuel production. This problem will only exacerbate as global warming progresses. Despite this, some of the important mechanisms employed by photosynthetic cells to regulate heat responses remain elusive. To engineer heat-tolerant crops and algae for food and biofuel, it is essential to understand how plant cells respond to and recover from high temperatures. The eukaryotic, unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is an excellent model organism to study many important cellular processes, especially heat responses, due to several prominent advantages, e.g. haploid genome, fast growth, homogenous heat treatment in liquid cultures, similar photosynthesis as in land plants, and simpler gene families than land plants. A genome-saturating, mapped, indexed mutant library of Chlamydomonas is available, enabling both reverse and forward genetic screens. By using tightly controlled Chlamydomonas cultivation and heat treatment in photobioreactors and quantitative, barcoded phenotyping tools, we investigated how Chlamydomonas responded to moderate and acute high temperatures at systems-wide levels, revealed dynamic heat responses under high tempratures, and identified high-confidence, putative heat tolerance genes (HTGs) at the genome-wide levels. Many of these high-confidence HTGs are highly conserved in land plants. We selected one high-confidence HTG, HTG1, for detailed function analysis. HTG1 transcripts in both Chlamydomonas and Arabidopsis were heat-inducible and the corresponding mutants were heat-sensitive, suggesting the information gained in Chlamydomonas can be transformed into land plants to improve crop thermotolerance and we can accelerate gene function analysis in land plants by using Chlamydomonas.
Visit the Zhang Lab website to learn more about Ru and her research!