EAGER: Emergent properties governing robustness in regulatory networks important for cell, tissue, and organ function

Plants are critical for all aspects of human life as the primary source of food, fiber, shelter, and fuel. Game-changing advances are needed for plant engineering to effectively and sustainably increase crop production and meet the demands of a growing population. Regulation of plant growth and biomass is dependent on the continuous generation of stem cells that differentiate to form all the cells, tissues, and organs of the plant. Understanding the spatial and temporal control of stem cell self-renewal and their differentiation is critical for generating predictable outcomes and redesigning plants for our future needs. At present, it is known that groups of cells differentiate and display functions in response to positional information, and those local cell-to-cell interactions drive cell-specific gene expression patterns. However, interrogating cellular reprogramming has thus far been limited by the challenge of manipulating individual cells. This EAGER award will lead to the development of novel technological advances that will enable the direct study of plant cell characteristics during organ formation. This project will combine interdisciplinary and convergent research training for postdocs, graduate, and undergraduate students. It will be coupled with professional development by means of established and ongoing outreach activities (i.e., including a summer internship for underrepresented minority undergraduates) to build the skill sets needed for tomorrow's workforce.

This research, exploiting 3D bioprinting, quantitative image analysis, and single-cell transcriptomics, will address the following question: What are the emergent system-level characteristics involved in cell-to-cell communication, patterning formation, and robustness that instruct cell identity and differentiation during plant organ formation? Accordingly, by combining 3D bioprinting with single-cell transcriptomics, this proposal will offer an innovative approach to study the minimal cues, positional effects, and signaling pathways key for plant developmental processes such as cell identity or differentiation in single cells. This research will broaden the understanding of how various signals are integrated with robust developmental programs, and this gained knowledge that could lead to the discovery of new patterns and forms.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.