Media Contact:
Dr. Michael Purugganan, 919/515-1761
Mick Kulikowski, News Services, 919/515-3470

Sept. 21, 2004

NC State Geneticist Gets $1.35 Million to Study Plant Blooming

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

How does a plant know when to bloom?

That is the heart of the question a geneticist at North Carolina State University and collaborators around the globe will study with a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Michael Purugganan, associate professor of genetics at NC State, will team with researchers from Brown University, Kansas State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Max Plank Institute for Developmental Biology to learn more about the forces that trigger flowering. They’ll focus on the model plant species Arabidopsis, or mustard weed.

“We want to find out how parts of the genome responsible for controlling flowering time are evolving in Arabidopsis,” Purugganan says. “We want a better understanding of how plants flower, and this may help us learn more about flowering in crops.”

Changes in day length, temperature and season may serve as harbingers of flowering time, for instance. But on the whole, Purugganan says little is currently understood about the ecology and evolution of the flowering process.

Further, the scientists hope to learn more about changes, if any, implicit in the gradual warming due to global climate change. Since winter chilling – cool temperatures necessary for a flower to grow and then reproduce successfully – is required for many plants, including a few species of Arabidopsis, how much does global warming impact flowering mechanisms in plants? And how do the plants adapt to warmer temperatures and the lack of winter chilling?

Purugganan’s lab at NC State will receive about $1.35 million to uncover differences in the genes that control flowering response in Arabidopsis plants from a wide range of European climates, from the Mediterranean to the subarctic. Although Arabidopsis can currently be found on most continents, Purugganan says that Arabidopsis originally comes from Europe, so testing the variations among the flowering genes of different European plants will provide good clues to how the plant has evolved.

Purugganan’s collaborators will also move plant samples from one European location to another – from Spain to Finland, for example – and examine any changes in the genetics of the plants after the switch. These studies could lead to important knowledge gains in how plants deal with climate change.

“In order to find out how plants are going to adapt in the future, we have to learn how plants adapt in the present and how they adapted in the past,” Purugganan says.

NC State’s portion of the grant is part of a $5 million grant funded by the National Science Foundation’s Frontiers for Integrated Biological Research program. The program was established to fund scientists asking important, key questions in biology.

- kulikowski -