Development of alternative biological models for the study of sugarcane regulatory networks

Abstract

One bottleneck in the improvement of sugarcane is the lack of basic information about its biology and the biology of grasses in general. One of the causes of this bottleneck is the difficulty in maintaining sugarcane as a biological model, due to its size and long life cycle. Moreover, sugarcane transformation and crossing are technically challenging, which makes the high-throughput use of forward and reverse genetics techniques impossible. In face of these difficulties, this project aims to use alternative model organisms as tools to study sugarcane regulatory networks. We propose the use of Arabidopsis thaliana and Brachypodium distachyon as main model organisms and Setaria italica as secondary model organisms. While A. thaliana and B. distachyon have many resources available to the community (established protocols, sequenced genome, stock centers, genetic maps, etc.), the Setaria have C4 photosynthesis, the same as sugarcane. We also propose to use of the bioluminescent protein LUCIFERASE as a promoter activity reporter. This reporter allows the estimation of promoter activity in a non-destructive way. These tools will be used to study the sugarcane circadian clock. The circadian clock is a regulatory network that organizes the plant metabolism in time. Plants that have no circadian clock accumulate less biomass and has smaller water use efficiency. We have recently identified more than 2 thousand sugarcane genes that are clock-regulated, especially those associated with photosynthesis and sugar metabolism. Even though our initial focus is in the circadian clock, this project increase the availability of tools that can be used in the study sugarcane, which can be used by other projects that are part of BIOEN and the Centro Paulista de Pesquisa em Bioenergia. (AU)