Circadian Rhythms and Growth in Challenging Conditions

In plants, the circadian system controls numerous processes including gene expression, photosynthesis, photoprotection, stomatal opening, and photoperiodic development. It has been suggested that modifying circadian rhythms may be a means to manipulate crops to develop “improved” plants for agriculture. However, to date, almost all plant circadian research has been focused on the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, in part because of a lack of tools for non-invasive, high-throughput platforms to analyzed circadian rhythms in other species. A major aim of the research in our lab is to develop novel platforms for circadian rhythm analysis to enable us to answer questions such as which aspects of circadian rhythms confer an adaptive benefit to plants and whether there are conditions in which circadian rhythmicity is of particular advantage? We are focusing on studying three plant groups. 1. Sorghum, the fifth most important cereal crop, widely grown in the developing world. 2. Wild barley, local to our region and from which cultivated barley was domesticated around 10,000 years ago. 3. Gymnosperms, a group of plants, including pine spruce and cedar, that have, surprisingly and in contrast to all other eukaryotic organisms studied, been reported to be arrhythmic. Our results with all three plant groups show that not only is there variability for circadian traits, even between plants of the same species, but that traits may be strongly correlated with different aspects of the plant’s environment and confer resistance to stressful conditions.