Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

Plants are the basis for agricultural production and many other sectors of Canada’s economy. Through photosynthesis, they convert environmental pollutants like CO 2 into the raw materials of tomorrow. They provide us with food, medicines, and the key to sustainable fuel production thanks to the complex metabolic pathways that make plants unique. Ironically, we understand little about their metabolism. Advancing our knowledge of this subject will create new opportunities to develop technologies that generate more nutritious food on less land, life-saving medicines with less waste, and more efficient fuels. This proposal details a long term vision for elucidating how plants convert minerals into valuable natural products, how environmental cues alter their metabolic priorities, and how small signaling molecules mediate this process . Simply put, this program aims to understand how the metabolism of plants is controlled . This will involve the application of rigorous mathematical techniques to quantitatively define the control points of these complex biological processes using models. The data for these models are obtained from direct, physiologically relevant measurements of metabolic processes in whole plants using isotopic labeling studies and mass spectrometry, the defining feature of my research program.

My program addresses the interface of primary (essential) and secondary (specialized) plant metabolism, focusing on a biosynthetic pathway yielding a high value group of natural products known as terpenoids. These ubiquitous compounds provide myriad biotechnological and agricultural opportunities for the Canadian economy via pest resistance, nutritional fortification, and pharmaceutical production in plant-based biofactories. Plants convert CO 2 in the atmosphere to terpenoids and many other compounds needed to power their growth and development, all while sensing stress in their surroundings and shifting their resources accordingly. This balancing act, which allocates metabolic resources like a finely tuned economy, strongly favors their survival and has a dramatic impact on our ability to coax plants into accumulating high value products of benefit to humans . Therefore, this proposal also focuses on a group of small signaling molecules which act as metabolic control switches, reprogramming how plants allocate their resources toward growth, defense, or valuable secondary metabolites like terpenoids . This quantitative, multidisciplinary approach to studying plant metabolism will create a new type of metabolic road map in Arabidopsis based on ‘pathway by pathway’ carbon use analysis. This novel approach to plant metabolism will create collaborative opportunities with synthetic biologists to address rising CO 2 levels, diminishing fossil fuels, and increasing demand for safe, highly nutritious produce using next generation plants.